Chapter 1: Africa
Metin Eren at Kent State told me that he and his colleagues often dream up experiments beyond archaeology. One involved the 1970 National Guard shootings at Kent. Having grown up in the Cleveland area, Eren always heard that the Guardsmen fired their shots randomly and only accidentally hit people. But Eren realized he could perhaps test this idea statistically by tracking down ballistics data for the rifles and pinpointing where the soldiers and their victims were. But with so much other work going on, he hasn’t had time to focus on this yet.
The biologist Louis Liebenberg, an authority on traditional African hunting, traces the origin of science itself to the constant sifting of clues that hunters perform during a hunt. After all, hunters not only gather evidence, but use that evidence to form theories and make predictions (about what an animal is doing). They then check those predictions against further evidence, and revise as needed.
To be sure, calling that process “science” might sound like a stretch. But Liebenberg and others emphasize that traditional hunting is not a passive activity; you don’t just follow a trail in the dirt. It takes skill to find spoor, and interpreting it well requires both keen observation and creative leaps. What is that if not a science? Science isn’t just test-tubes and formulas. First and foremost, it’s a mindset.
In a more formal follow-up survey that was a bit more formal than the green blob-man, Eren and a few collaborators found that ¼ of knappers have needed tourniquets or professional medical care during their knapper careers—and these were the ones who admitted it or actually went in. There’s a macho ethos in knapping, and some may have not wanted to additionally injure their pride.
As Kayate experienced when butchering the elephant, the blood and guts and grease can leave your hands a slippery mess, making it nearly impossible to work. Modern bison butchers deal with this problem by shearing off tufts of hair and balling them in their fists to soak up the gore. For less hirsute animals, grass would work. Regardless, that’s an insight into the butchering process you’d never glean from digging up dusty bones; it becomes clear only with experiments on flesh-and-blood animals.
Despite this pooh-poohing, I still hold out hope that Eren thinks of himself as a sort of sculptor, similar to the way Michelangelo would envision a work inside a block of marble, then merely “free” it with his chisel. Nope. When I suggest this, Eren smirks. “If I wasn’t a scientist wanting to understand the past, I probably wouldn’t flint-knap,” he admits. To him, rocks are more like puzzles to solve, little mineral Rubik’s cubes, and knapping is more akin to an “algorithm”: “You hit enter, and the program runs.” You strike the rock, and the exact flake you want chips off. At least for him.
As mentioned, obsidian flakes can form edges sharper than steel. Metin Eren told me about an old colleague of his that shaved with obsidian once. It removed his beard hair quite well, along with most of his epidermis. I can also personally attest to the danger. A few days before visiting Eren at Kent State, I attended a Saturday wedding celebration for a friend that featured temporary tattoos. Mine was looking ratty by mid-week, so I tried to scrape it off with an obsidian blade. It did not go well. The tattoo remained stubbornly in place, and my skin grew an angry, inflamed red.
Although written language did not exist until about 5500 years ago, notations for numbers may predate writing by a long time. In Border Cave in South Africa, archaeologists recovered a baboon fibula from 42,000 years ago marked with notches; hyena bones with similar markings have turned up at Neanderthal sites. The notches all run in parallel, and each looks nearly identical, making them seem more functional than decorative.
Incidentally, most hunter-gatherer societies around the world, at least in pre-modern times, generally didn’t have specific words for numbers higher than four. (They counted, “One, two, three, many.”) Such groups also tended to have few material goods, limited to weapons and tools and some jewelry, perhaps. Cultures with numbers that stretched beyond four tended to have far more possessions. This hints that the accumulation of possessions drove the need to count: people needed to keep track of their lucre.
Wild dogs in Africa are an odd mix of graceful and goofy. They stand two feet tall and weigh up to seventy pounds, with scraggly piebald coats of black, tan, and white. They bound along as smoothly as deer, but have surprisingly big and round Mickey Mouse ears. And their “bark” is more of a tweeting bird yodel than the throaty “ruff, ruff” of domesticated canines. Goofy or not, a team of wild dogs can take down lions, and they’re especially fierce defending food.
One difference between stone blades and metal blades is that stone blades wear down faster. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. If the flakes of stone are chipping off in parallel to the blade face, then every lost bit will effectively resharpen the tool, a handy trick. Still, even tiny flakes add up over time, and stone tools wear down into nubs far faster than metal will.
The chapter focused mostly on stone tools, but antler tools were common in prehistory as well, especially antler hammerstones for shaping tools. Antlers are plenty firm—especially if you’re on the business end of a charge—but on a molecular level, they’re actually far softer than, say, granite. As a result, when you strike a rock with antler, the two surfaces stay in contact much longer. Energy therefore propagates differently through the material, and the flakes that crack off have a different shape.
Volume-wise, the average ostrich egg is the equivalent of around two dozen chicken eggs, but that’s not even close to the largest bird egg in history. Elephant birds of Madagascar laid eggs eight times larger still, the equivalent of 160 chicken eggs. Elephant birds survived until 1000 AD before going extinct.
Lyn Wadley has found evidence for snares in southern Africa dating back several tens of thousands of years. In some cultures, snaring is an activity reserved for the very old or very young; hunters like Xate often hold it in contempt. But in many ways, snaring takes more cunning than hunting. It requires not only knowing the animal’s behavior but also constructing an intricate, multi-part trap.
Kayate wasn’t just being overcautious in avoiding the ostrich; their kicks can be fatal. Country music legend Johnny Cash kept an ostrich named Waldo on his farm, and Waldo nearly disemboweled him one day with a kick. As Cash later wrote, “Frankly, I got off lightly. All he did was break my two lower ribs and rip my stomach open down to my belt. If the belt hadn’t been good and strong, with a solid belt buckle, he’d have spilled my guts exactly the way he meant to.”
Chapter 2: South America
Archaeologists have long known that ancient people heat-treated rocks to strengthen them for tools, but the details of the process have remained murky. Naively, many archaeologists assumed that people just tossed the stones directly into firepits like so many potatoes and let them roast. But work by Lyn Wadley in South Africa, among others, has put that myth to rest, because rocks tossed directly into fires usually crack if not explode. (And yes, rocks can explode, if the tiny pockets of steam or gas inside them expand with enough force.) Instead, Wadley found it best to bury rocks in the soil beneath or beside a fire, where temperatures are significantly lower than in the middle (maybe 700°F, as opposed to 1400°F). Those rocks emerge perfectly roasted.
Asana stalked the Andean altiplano barefoot, partly due to a lack of other options, but even nowadays people there often stroll around in winter coats, wool hats—and open-toed sandals. Their exposed feet look as gnarly as rhinoceros hides, yet they don’t seem to mind the wind whistling across their tootsies.
As noted, fraudsters often sell “authentic” stone tools online after artificially aging them with various tricks, and archaeologists like Metin Eren at Kent State worry that their scientific replicas could be repurposed for nefarious ends. That’s why Eren “signs” everything he makes with a diamond-tipped “pen,” which looks like a regular old black Bic, complete with a cheap cap, and retails for under $30. Who knew? Signing tools also ensures that archaeologists a million years from now won’t find his wares and mistakenly conclude that a neo–Stone Age culture persisted in Ohio long after the Industrial Revolution.
Eren’s lab uses artificial sinew in their work because, as an experimental lab first and foremost, they want to run trials fifty to a hundred times, and it seemed wasteful and cruel to sacrifice so many animals just for scraps of real sinew. He added that he’s run tests to confirm that real and artificial sinew have similar properties anyway.
At one point, I started making a list of the astounding number of things that people in prehistory once made from various parts of deer and antelope legs. The list included tweezers, glue, buttons, musical rasps, needles, needle cases, gaming dice, hair pins, sinew, knives, chisels, toe-bone hooks for fishing, rings, earrings, and more.
Atlatls (spear-throwers) can be incredibly accurate over short distances. Anthropologists have recorded stories of a man from Tasmania who could thread a broomstick through a hole in a wall from twelve yards away, despite the hole being just a half-inch wider than the spear. That said, the man was exceptionally skilled. And again, the accuracy and penetrating power of a spear drop off quickly with distance. For hunting, atlatls remain superior.
Inevitably, some archaeologists challenged Haas’s conclusions. Not about the sex of the huntress—that’s secure—but about how far he can extrapolate from her to hunter-gatherers in general. For instance, two of the female hunters in his literature review were infants, and it’s reasonable to ask whether those cases should count, given that infants don’t hunt. Other critics suggested that the women had simply been buried with tools for symbolic reasons that we cannot hope to parse thousands of years later.
Haas doesn’t buy that last criticism. He cites a sweeping, now-classic review of burial practices first published in 1971. The review notes that burial practices are messy, a hodgepodge of a thousand different customs across the globe. But there is one consistent rule—that, in Haas’s words, “the objects that accompany people in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life.” In other words, you wouldn’t bury a woman with hunting tools unless she hunted with them.
Until a few million years ago, North and South America were separate continents with their own unique animals—at least taxonomically. Looking back, biologists can see remarkable examples of convergence between the continents, in that almost every big North American species seemingly had a South American counterpart, and vice-versa. Both places had elephant-like creatures with trunks, saber-tooth cats, quasi-rhinoceroses, sorta-horses, and so on—fauna through the looking glass. That probably happened because there are only so many types of landscapes on earth, and certain bodies are best suited for each niche. So their evolutions converged.
Then something mysterious happened. Roughly 2.5 million years ago, North and South America “collided”—if I can use such a dramatic word to describe an impact speed of a few centimeters per year. Over time, the buckling of tectonic plates threw up the isthmus of Panama, connecting the Americas via land and allowing each continent’s animals to mingle for the first time. Unsurprisingly, some of the invaders from North America migrated down and wiped South American creatures. Oddly, though, the reverse rarely happened: only a few South American species took hold up north. No one knows why. Many of the South American species that got wiped out were marsupials, so perhaps they suffered some unknown disadvantage compared to northern mammals, which were largely placental. In addition, while South America floated free for most of its history, North America had joined and detached from the Asian and European landmasses a few times in previous geological eras, so its animals had weathered similar invasions in the past. Perhaps this prepared them for the inevitable stressors and disease epidemics of such invasions, hardening them in ways that South America animals had not been.
Regardless, when humans arrived in the Americas, each continent still had megafauna—large beasts that would seem mythological in size today. And all too quickly, nearly all of them vanished.
Sloths are closely related to anteaters, and while modern tree sloths traveled down the evolutionary path of extreme slowness, giant sloths probably retained the characteristics of anteaters—who don’t exactly possess cat-like reflexes, but aren’t comically lethargic, either.
Chapter 3: Çatalhöyük
Archaeologists still argue, a lot, about whether Çatalhöyük was a true city. Some insist on calling it a proto-city or mega-village, reserving the “true” moniker for other, later settlements. Regardless, the appearance of Çatalhöyük marks something new in history.
This equality extended to sex relations, in that men and women led remarkably similar lives there. As former site director Ian Hodder once said, “What we are seeing is … a society in which, in many areas, the question of whether you were a man or a woman did not determine the life you could lead.”
At Çatalhöyük, grinding stones represented wealth, and the culture was not alone in this. During Bronze Age Mesopotamia, giant millstones regularly got passed from generation to generation and were sometimes given as wedding gifts. The people who owned these luxury items of course never dirtied their hands and actually ground grain themselves—that was for their arthritic-knuckled servants and slaves. But these were valued pieces of machinery way back when.
Assuming the people of Boncuklu did found Çatalhöyük, they must have had a reason for suddenly packing homes together at the new site. Unfortunately, that reason eludes us today. But we’re reasonably sure it had nothing to do with defense: there’s zero evidence of any wars or battles at Çatalhöyük. Obviously, some violence occurred—people are people. But wars leave scars in the archaeological record, and those scars don’t exist at Çatalhöyük.
A note on the evolution of domesticated grains: As wild grains grow fatter, their delicate stems eventually break under the weight and release the seed. This process, called “shattering,” deposits the seed on soil and allows it to germinate.
Several thousand years ago, some ancient varieties of barley and wheat suffered a mutation that strengthened the stem and prevented shattering. Under normal circumstances, this would have been catastrophic to those plants, since it effectively prevented reproduction. But it turned out to be one of the luckiest mutations in history, because human beings nearby found it more convenient to harvest these grains from waist height rather than root around in the dirt. As a result, these non-shattering grains—which would be totally dysfunctional if left to their own devices—became vital to the human diet and are now some of the most widespread plants on Earth.
All of which raises a provocative question: Did we humans exploit these grains, or did they exploit us?
Obviously some smoke escaped through the ceiling hole. But surprisingly little. Smoke spreads as it rises, so without a flue to channel it, some pollution was inevitable. Archaeologists have also suggested that breezes outside might be shearing across the roof and interacting with the hole in complicated, fluid-dynamic-y ways, thereby creating vortexes that pushed the smoke back inside. I dunno. All I can say is that the hole did squat, and my lungs felt coated in tar for the rest of the day.
The replica homes I saw at Çatalhöyük were mostly for show, but I actually got to run around on the rooftops of a very similar home at another site in Turkey, Aşıklı Höyük, which dates to just before Çatalhöyük.
When I arrived at Aşıklı Höyük, I found four replica homes set just a foot apart in a square. A ladder was propped against one, and none of the local workers seemed to mind my climbing it when I asked, so I scurried up. Little poofs of dust puffed up wherever I stepped, like a Wild West main street. There were a few soft spots as well where I sank down, but most of the roof felt quite solid underfoot. Emboldened, I even tried hopping the gaps from one building to another. Although I landed unscathed, I could easily imagine tripping and bloodying your shins on the sharp reeds sticking out.
After five minutes, a dust-encrusted archaeology student approached me and, with a wide warm grin, told me to get the hell down. It turned out that they built the homes in part to let them weather and collapse; seeing what the rubble looks like will help interpret the ruins they’ve excavated. So unless I wanted to end up buried there, and join some archaeological site myself, I’d best get down. I complied speedily. But it was amazing to be transported, if only for a few moments, to the rooftops of Çatalhöyük, like a Neolithic Peter Pan.
I’ll just toss this in there. While researching this book, I came across a story about Alexander the Great throwing bits of chopped-up flesh into a pit that contained a cache of inaccessible diamonds. Flesh supposedly sticks to diamond, and when vultures swooped in and grabbed the flesh, the diamonds reportedly dropped off as they flew away. It seemed pretty darn apocryphal, but it turns out that there may be some basis to the legend. Diamonds (and gold) apparently do stick to fatty, greasy flesh, so in theory at least the method could work.
I’ll add that archaeologists have long known of a simple trick to distinguish fossilized bones from mere rock. (The two can look awfully alike, especially when crushed.) Just dab the sample to your tongue. Rocks will fall off. Bones will stick, probably due to their highly porous nature and ability to draw in fluids like saliva.
Given our voluminous brains, human beings presumably have more than enough to tan our own hides. And in case you’re wondering, yes, human skin has been tanned into leather before. Rumors about Nazis turning concentration-camp victims into lampshades don’t seem to be true, but DNA testing has uncovered several books bound in people. There’s also the nábrók of Iceland, pants made of human skin. No authentic pair has ever turned up, so we don’t know whether they ever existed outside folklore. But ancient witches supposedly peeled them off of corpses—carefully preserving even the toenails—then tanned them and strutted around. Apparently, the scrotums would magically fill with money and make the wearer rich.
Due to their poor preservation, it’s probably impossible to determine when human beings started making leather or rawhide goods. But at least 10,000 years ago. By using microscopes, archaeologists can see tiny scratches on stone tools (use-wear marks) from 780,000 years ago that look an awful lot like the scratches that appear on modern stone tools when tanners make experimental hides. So leather may predate even modern Homo sapiens.
In a related question, we can ask when humans first started wearing clothing, period. We can gauge this by looking at body lice. Hair lice has long bedeviled many species, but we humans could confine our itchy freeloaders to our heads and pubic areas—at least until we started wearing clothing. Conveniently, body lice evolved from head lice but are genetically distinct, so by studying their genomes and tracing both back to their point of divergence, we can guess that humankind was wearing clothing for 80,000-100,000 years.
Technically, this wouldn’t have been rawhide since it underwent some processing. But it would have been crusty and uncomfortable to wear. When making leather, anything that calls to mind rawhide equals failure.
That said, I’m probably being too hard on ol’ rawhide. It is a useful material. It makes durable soles for shoes. It can line pits for soaking things or form baskets to stone-boil food. You can even chop it up and soak it in water to make a glue that, when dry, will absolutely stick your fingers together—it’s capable of holding 20,000 pounds per square inch. Luckily, the glue dissolves in water and can easily be stripped away.
Chapter 4: Egypt
A note on ancient Egyptian music. The Egyptians didn’t have written notation for music, but they did have something like a conductor. Only he wasn’t the sort of symphonic conductor you might be picturing today—someone waving their arms around to keep the orchestra together. The conductor played music as well, and actually provided the initial pitches and rhythms. In this way, he was more like the leader of a jazz band improving a tune that everyone else then riffed on.
Unlike with mummification and pyramid-building, the Egyptians included lots—lots—of pictures of brewing and baking on the walls of temples and other public buildings. Unfortunately, the pictures are highly stylized and lack much in the way of how-to instructions, so ambiguities and gaps in our knowledge remain. (Some inscriptions don’t even relate to baking or brewing; they’re comic relief. In one case, a worker barks, “Get on with your work, you laggard.” Another answers, “Don’t listen to him. He’s a big-mouth.”) Furthermore, given how long Egyptian society lasted, and how uniform the pictures are throughout that history, some scholars suggest that the artistic record was more conservative than everyday practice, because the artistic record was tied up with religious rituals that could not vary without incurring the wrath of the gods.
The Xbox inventor and gastro-Egyptologist Seamus Blackley sometimes cooks with modern flour instead of heirloom emmer flour, although he says that the loaves tend to “explode” because “the quality of the ingredients is so extreme now” compared to ancient times. That’s partly because modern wheats are bred with much higher protein content. “It was a great scientific achievement,” he adds, in terms of making the bread healthier, “but it’s taken a lot of the deep, rich, crazy character out of bread,” and left it tasting blander as a result.
However scrumptious Egyptian bread is, it did a real number on their teeth. Grinding the grains into flour on stone querns introduced microscopic bits of sand and grit that wore their teeth down. The starches in the breads likely contributed to tooth decay as well.
After brewers add enzymes to break long-chain starch molecules down and then boil the water, the resulting liquid is called wort. It’s quite sweet, and some beer historians think that the Biblical phrase “the land of milk and honey” might actually refer to milk and wort, since it’s an excellent sweetener, and grain wort was once very common in Egypt and the Levant.
David Falk, the archaeologist whose recipe I followed in making ancient Egyptian beer, actually carbonated a few pints of his batch just to see if the base brew could be adapted for modern tastes. It could. The beer had a nice white head and sparkled beautifully, and the CO2 brought out the citrus and date flavors that were masked before. Carbon dioxide turns water acidic, so adding CO2 can alter a drink’s flavor. But as much as anything, Falk says that carbonation alters the mouthfeel of drinks: “It’s creating a gas barrier between the liquid and your taste buds.” That tingling “adds a sense experience, which we interpret as flavor.” If you’d like to see Falk’s process and make the beer yourself, there’s a link here.
Some evidence supporting the primacy of beer over bread is archaeological. Consider Göbekli Tepe (“potbelly hill”) in eastern Turkey, which dates back 11,000 years. Archaeologists have uncovered perhaps the world’s first temples there: giant T-shaped monoliths, some of them 20 feet tall and weighing 20,000 pounds; many were carved with bulls, spiders, snakes, and scorpions for decorations.
Archaeologists have also uncovered troughs for liquids that can hold 160 liters, three times the size of a keg; one had the scapula of an ass in it, perfect for stirring mash. And while the areas around the troughs are littered with wild grains, there are no domesticated ones. That’s important because wild grains differ anatomically: they have husks and chaff that are much harder to separate from the kernel. This makes them unsuitable to grind down into bread flour, which needs to be quite fine. (With modern bread wheat, the grain falls cleanly out of the husk when you thresh it.)
As a cute aside, I’ll note that the arguments over whether beer or bread came first in history has been dubbed the “Did man once live by beer alone?” controversy.
Beer might have pushed us in wholly new directions, culture-wise. As anthropologists have noted, if you put a few hundred chimpanzees together in a small space, like an airplane, you’re going to end up with a bloody battle royale—murder, mayhem, death, destruction, and probably actual detached limbs lying around. Early humans were feisty as well, and probably attacked strangers as a matter of course. But drinks can mellow us out—liquor lubricates the social process and allows for large-scale socialization.
The famous Code of Hammurabi—a stone tablet outlining the laws of ancient Babylon, composed circa 1750 B.C.—outlines acceptable conduct at taverns. Overcharging a customer could mean death by drowning. High priestesses caught in a drinking den could be burned to death.
Technically, the refractometer measured the sugar content of the liquid, which I then converted into an ABV using a formula. In olden times, experienced brewers could judge the potency of beer by taste alone—the sweeter the initial liquid, the stronger the punch in the final product.
Mummies in the past did not receive such respect. Instead, they were viewed as an industrial commodity, more like an ore, and were commonly pulped to make paper, burned as locomotive fuel, or ground into powder and swallowed as medicine. Even as late as 1890, a steamship pulled into Liverpool, England, with 19½ tons—39,000 pounds—of cat mummies. At the dock, the crew auctioned some off as souvenirs, while the remainders were ground up for mulch.
The mashing step of brewing—breaking long-chain starch molecules into simple sugars—takes advantage of two enzymes, alpha-amylase, which works best around 150°F, and beta-amylase, which thrives around 140°F. Nowadays brewers can punch a few buttons and cook the mash at exactly both temps, but that would have been far more difficult in ancient times. Indeed, it would have been hard to judge the temperature at all between about 120°F and boiling. Therefore, some scholars speculate that perhaps brewers used a trick. Around 160°F, hot water becomes still enough to see your reflection clearly. Below this temp, the surface is often too bumpy; above that temp, it’s too steamy. So brewers could have warmed water up until they saw their faces, then let it cool a bit to the nearly optimal temperature.
With regard to the archaeologists who mummified a human being: Some people have asked me whether Bob Brier and Ronn Wade got the consent of the man or his family beforehand. Kind of. The man did donate his body to science, and beyond that, you don’t get much say—where you end up is determined by anatomy state boards like the one Wade led. They did tell the man’s family that he’d be part of an “ongoing, long-term project,” but it’s unclear whether they specified that “long-term” could mean thousands of years.
Although Brier and Wade did not do this step, during an ancient mummification, a priest clad in a leopard robe would sometimes perform a ceremony that involved touching white stones or the leg of a ritually slaughtered calf to the mummy’s face, to “open” his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth and allow him to speak, eat, and use his senses in the afterlife.
Another reason the Egyptians left the heart and its major veins and arteries intact in mummies was their belief that all important bodily fluids (blood, mucus, air, semen) traveled through the heart’s vessels.
As mentioned in the text, Brier and Wade learned several important things about mummification by running their experiment. Here are two more.
First, the typical Egyptian mummy was dried for seventy days, about half of that under natron. To avoid any chance of rot, Brier and Wade dried their body for four months. But the excess drying time had a cost, as it left their mummy overly stiff. Brier argues that a seventy-day drying period would be a good compromise between avoiding rot and ensuring pliability.
Second, due to ambiguities in ancient texts, many archaeologists once argued that Egyptian embalmers dehydrated their bodies not by covering them with dry natron but soaking them in extremely salty brine. Brier and Wade’s work shows that brine was unnecessary, and probably would have been harmful.
In ancient Egypt, embalmers wrapped the mummies of pharaohs and other elites in expensive, custom-made linen, while people of modest or no means got bound in recycled clothes or rags. It’s similar to how the plutocrats of the Gilded Age were buried in handsome cherry or walnut coffins, while paupers were laid to rest in busted-up fruit crates and other scrap.
In 2022, archaeologists discovered possible mummies in Portugal dating back to 6000 BC. The oldest confirmed mummies in history date back to 5000 BC, from the Chinchorro people in what’s now Peru. (These were the descendants of Maya in chapter 2, the people who lived along the coast and grew deaf from gathering shellfish in cold water.) To preserve their dearly departed, the Chinchorro buried the corpses in swampy plots, then unearthed them and replaced the brain and inner organs with clay, feathers, dirt, and/or camelid hair, forming a sort of effigy. Next, they patched any missing skin with sea-lion hide, and painted features and facial expressions on. A wig of the person’s own hair completed the ensemble. The fact that some mummies were painted and repainted hints that they were on display. In general, while the Egyptians sealed mummies off in tombs, the Chinchorro made a public spectacle of their dead. They engaged in mummification for an incredibly long time, too, almost four thousand years.
Although it’s hard to know for sure, burial goods seemingly became more abundant and elaborate in the centuries after the Egyptians stopped building pyramids. In other words, later generations chose to lavish their love on the deceased in the form of treasure rather than gargantuan monuments. But the pyramids must have held some tempting goodies, or else thieves wouldn’t have bothered tunneling in and looting them.
To be clear, the stiffening of the muscles and joints was due to dehydration, not rigor mortis. Bodies do stiffen up a few hours after death, but rigor mortis wears off after a day or two.
Again, the Egyptians were far from alone in making mummies in ancient times, and compared to some societies, the Egyptians were dilettantes with regard to their regard for mummies. In particular, as one scholar noted, “Inca society had a serious mummy problem.” The Inca (the society of Machu Picchu in ancient Peru) worshiped deceased emperors as gods, and mummified them to keep them “alive.” One Inka ruler, to make himself seem more legitimate, even forced his mother to marry his mummified father—who also happened to be her brother.
As a result of their being alive legally, Inkan mummies retained all their property after death and needed to be waited on by scads of attendants. Each clan of attendants of course considered “their” mummy-emperor superior, and despised other clans attached to other mummies. And as the centuries passed and more and more mummies piled up, the number of such clans grew and grew, until the rivalries erupted into civil warfare—a warfare that Spanish conquistadors exploited. Some historians have therefore blamed the fall of the Inca in part on this mummy fetish. Say what you will about kings inheriting their thrones, it does solve the problem of succession cleanly.
A few societies were still mummifying people into modern times. For instance, the Soviet Union preserved Vladmir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The same happened to Kim Il Sung and Chairman Mao.
Less creepily, a clan in Papua New Guinea called the Anga also mummifies its dead on occasion today. The Anga (or Angu) live on remote interior mountains; reaching their villages from the coast requires a full-day drive, then a three-hour hike.
Whereas the Egyptians mummified people by removing the interior organs and drying everything with natron, the Anga ward off decomposition by smoking their bodies whole for a few months. They then mount the mummies on a bamboo frame and prop it on a rock ledge near the village, so their ancestors can watch over them and protect them.
In recent years, as the modern world encroached, the Anga mummified fewer and fewer bodies, partly because it’s such a long, expensive, time-consuming process—not to mention the fact that modern sensibilities found the odors off-putting. But around 2015, an old man named Gemtasu asked to be mummified; despite the dying tradition, he longed to protect his family in the hereafter. So he taught his children the process and prepared for his own death, even supervising the building of the bamboo scaffold that would serve as his throne on the ledge.
When Gemtasu died, his children suspended his body over a smoky fire inside a hut, poking it with sticks as it bloated to release excess gas and fluid. Another stick widened and held open the anus to let his decaying internal organs plop out. As required by the ritual, relatives had to stay with the body at all times, to make sure no part of it ever touched the ground, not even the fluids or putrefied organs. They worked especially hard to preserve the face. As the Angu explained to a reporter, they don’t have photography, so traditionally, this was their only way of preserving a visual memory of the dead.
Another reason the ritual has been dying out is that it puts serious demands on those holding vigil—in this case, seven men, including one of Gemtasu’s grandsons. They were forbidden to drink water during the entire smoking process, just cane juice from bamboo. In addition, they could eat only food cooked over the smoking fire. They also had to smear the fluids from his body on themselves, to preserve his spirit—and they couldn’t wash themselves at all. But they considered the sacrifices worth it to fulfill dear Gemtasu’s wishes, and ensure his continued protection over them.
As another measure of the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, all of the following buildings—St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, St. Paul’s in London, Westminster Abbey, and several other cathedrals to boot—would easily fit within its base.
Moreover, one tricky aspect of building the pyramids is that you’ve got to make all four triangular faces meet perfectly in a point at the top. The easiest way to do this would be to take constant lines of sight from the ground: stand at the bottom, look up (perhaps with some sort of straightedge), and make sure that every block you place is in the right position. But if you build a spiral ramp, you can’t do this, because the ramp would cover all the blocks on the lower levels. Suddenly, there’s a lot more guesswork involved. And given how precise the pyramids are, it doesn’t seem like there was a lot of guesswork involved.
Again, it’s not clear why the Egyptians kept the methods for constructing the pyramids a secret. Possibly they didn’t want other nations building their own pyramids and stealing their glory, or perhaps the technique had military applications. Regardless, ancient Egypt suffered periodic convulsions throughout its history where knowledge of certain technologies was lost, and pyramid know-how might have been a casualty of one of them.
Some scholars have suggested that, in building the pyramids, Egyptian work crews could have lubricated the ramps with milk or oil to facilitate sliding blocks up. Perhaps, but lubricating a mile-long ramp would take ridiculous amounts of liquid. It would also make the walking surface slippery for the workers, while simultaneously making the blocks more likely to slip back down. And no matter what, lubricating a ramp still doesn’t eliminate the giant construction headache of building the ramp in the first place.
The Pyramids are more architecturally complex on the inside than they might seem. The Great Pyramid, for instance, contains ascending and descending tunnels, airshafts, a grotto, a vertical “well,” a subterranean chamber carved into the bedrock, portcullises, two mysterious voids of unknown purpose, and an antechamber leading into the tomb of Khufu himself.
The Egyptians did not smelt iron until about 600 BC, so meteorites were their only source of the metal. Textual references imply that they understood that meteors came from outer space, or at least the “heavens”: in their mythology, the sky was a giant iron bowl, and pieces of the bowl sometimes plummeted to earth. This knowledge about the celestial origin of meteors was eventually lost and not rediscovered until the 1700s.
Archaeologists have also speculated about the use of poisons to deter robbers. During an excavation in modern times, one team walked into a tomb and felt sudden pains in their chests, as if someone was poking them with thorns. They traced the scare to hematite, a yellow iron ore related to ochre.
Tomb-robbing persisted long after the fall of the last pharaoh. There was even a how-to guide for thieves, written in Arabic, that appeared in medieval times. The Book of Buried Pearls listed known burial sites along with spells to disarm and defeat the genies and demons guarding each place. One scholar estimated that this single book caused more damage to ancient Egyptian archeology than all the wars and natural disasters in the nation’s multi-millennia history combined.
Chapter 5: Polynesia
For some reason, the people of Polynesia paused after settling Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, and stopped scouting for new islands. Perhaps they needed to develop better ships or navigation techniques to reach the truly remote islands to the east. Global climate patterns also shifted in the first millennium B.C., making the waters of the Pacific more choppy and less navigable. Social factors may have played a role as well: perhaps they were preoccupied with wars or internal conflicts instead of looking outward. Regardless, the push eastward resumed 1000 to 1500 years later.
No one quite knows when the first boats and ships arose, but they’re pretty darn old. Depictions of boats in rock art (in Azerbaijan) date back 10,000 years, and there’s evidence that humans reached Australia as early as 65,000 years ago, which even in a time of much lower sea levels would have required setting out across open stretches of water. Heck, a million years ago, our ancestor Homo erectus seemingly made sea journeys of 15 miles, to the Indonesian island of Flores. We are not landlubbers historically.
With regard to the barkcloth called tapa/kapa, Polynesians often dyed it a bright, sunshiny yellow with the roots of the noni tree. On my trip to Hawaii, I got to taste noni fruit, a bulbous, polypy sort of thing. It was the color of pus and tasted surprisingly like Parmesan cheese.
I mentioned that tapa/kapa felt a bit scratchy on my skin. But in fairness I’ll note that, during my lesson, we also skipped over one step in the interest of time—soaking the fresh bast in water to ferment it slightly. This softens the final product.
People in Oceania commonly decorated the bows and sterns of their canoes with male and female figures, bird heads, or bird tails. These wooden carvings watched over sailors during journeys and also deflected water that would otherwise spray into the boat. The deities often had muscular bodies with sharp angles, reminiscent of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Many had bejeweled eyes to represent wisdom and sharp senses. The deities’ feet were sometimes wrapped in leis before journeys to ensure a swift return to land.
The decks of ships were often made of planks with spaces between them for water to splash through. Without such gaps, upswelling waves would batter the ship from below and eventually crack it. This made for a wet time on deck, but as the old chestnut has it, “Better safe than dry.”
As modern experiments have shown, ancient people could have used shark teeth for pretty much everything: sawing wood, carving trinkets, gutting fish, drilling bone, tipping arrows, puncturing rawhide, performing surgery, et cetera. The Polynesians also made pretty gnarly weapons with them, including wooden spears studded with shark teeth. Some such spears stretched eighteen feet long.
While researching this chapter, I came across what has to be one of the more unique entries in the annals of experiment archaeology: a paper where scientists tested the efficiency of shark teeth at cutting flesh by mounting the teeth, with epoxy, on a reciprocating power saw from Ace Hardware and unleashing it on some salmon chum. A sort of cross between Jaws and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Given the lack of written languages in Polynesia, navigators had to memorize all their knowledge about sailing, but they did employ mnemonic devices at times, especially for teaching purposes, including seashell-stick diagrams and gourd globes with information burned into them.
In addition to revealing the location of land, clouds also reveal information about impending weather, especially early in the morning. High red-orange morning cloud-cover usually means rain within a few days. Low red clouds on the horizon means rain is coming soon.
Incidentally, because clouds offer such important clues for finding land, it’s actually easier to discover new land during stormy weather than fair weather—although obviously storms can introduce rough weather, disorienting delays, and other complications.
The use of birds to find land is fairly well known, but the Kon-Tiki crew that sailed from South America to Polynesia inadvertently discovered a way to use undersea critters. After they hauled a shark onto their deck one afternoon, it began flopping around and barfed up a half-digested starfish. Starfish generally stick to coasts, so unless the shark was one that ranged widely, you could perhaps deduce that land was near from that.
Master navigators pick up on clues that are so subtle that I’ve heard people attribute their skills to quasi-spiritualist baloney—claiming that such people are simply more “in tune” with the godhead of nature or something. But there’s nothing mysterious or woowoo about their work. Master navigators have simply spent so much time studying and absorbing little clues about the winds, waves, and water that their brains have wired themselves to react to such clues, even if they can’t articulate the reasons for their deductions.
Master navigators also talk about slipping into a “flow state” during voyages similar to what musicians and painters experience—where hours pass without them noticing. At that point, they’re not so much reading clues consciously as they are simply channeling a stream of information and reacting automatically, like an athlete.
In 1947 a Norwegian adventurer named Thor Heyerdahl, along with a few companions, slapped together a primitive balsawood raft dubbed Kon-Tiki and successfully sailed from South America to Polynesia. Aside from a few items (a sextant, knives, watches), the raft contained no modern equipment or materials whatsoever; it could have sprung right out of 1000 B.C. Heyerdahl undertook the voyage to support his pet theory that the first people to colonize Polynesia were ancient South Americans sailing west.
Heyerdahl later wrote a book about the voyage, and I cannot emphasize enough how thrilling it is—picaresque and romantic and stirring. It’s also bunk. There’s overwhelming genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence that Polynesia was settled west to east by people starting in Asia, not vice-versa. Heyerdahl was wrong, simple as that.
But I’ll give him credit for one thing: perhaps more than anyone else, he opened people’s eyes to the power of experimental archaeology, showing stuffy armchair academics that they could learn a lot by getting out in the world and actually doing and making things. Since Kon-Tiki, there have been dozens of similar archaeological voyages, some of which have been quite fruitful and instructive. And to be fair to Heyerdahl’s original theory, some scientists now argue that a little cultural and genetic exchange did occur between Polynesian and South American people. This could explain, for instance, how South American foods like the sweet potato ended up in Polynesia. But it was almost certainly Polynesian people driving the trade.
For the geometry and geography geeks: The “sight range” of an island, in miles, equals the square root of the observer’s height in feet plus the square root of the island’s highest peak in feet, all multiplied by 1.15. For an island peak with a 4,000-foot peak, an average, 5-foot-6-inch person could see it from 75.4 miles out. Climbing up the mast to 30 feet extends the range to 79 miles—a 5 percent advantage. That advantage increases markedly for lower islands. If the top peak reaches just 200 feet, the advantage grows to 19 percent. I should note that this is a maximum, and only applies to perfect conditions. A haze like the one Loa faced will drastically reduce the sight range.
To be sure, Polynesia contains low islands as well—both Micronesia and Polynesia are a mix. But for whatever reason, knowledge about traditional navigation did not survive on Polynesian low islands.
In 1992, while at sea, the recreated Hawaiian vessel mentioned in the text—Hōkūle’a—took a satellite phone along and chatted during the voyage with the space shuttle Columbia orbiting high overhead. It was a stirring moment, modern wayfinders gazing down at their predecessors.
Hōkūle’a has made dozens of journeys over the years, and has a sterling safety record overall, but there was one fatality, on a voyage to Tahiti in 1978. In the middle of the night, the ship capsized six hours from shore. A celebrated surfer onboard named Eddie Aikau took off paddling on a surfboard to summon help. Partway back, he apparently took off his life-jacket to make paddling easier; it was later found washed ashore. But Eddie’s body never turned up. The crew was meanwhile rescued by a Coast Guard cutter. The search for Eddie’s body was reportedly the largest air search in the history of Hawaii.
For those who care about details like shunting, the bottom of the mast is fixed in place and doesn’t move. But the mast can lean left or right roughly 20 degrees depending on where the sail is. So as the sail and boom swing from, say, left to right, the mast transitions from left-leaning to right-leaning.
Chapter 6: Rome
Some societies in ancient times tattooed runaway or otherwise rebellious slaves instead of binding them in iron collars, since you obviously couldn’t remove the former. But there was a major downside to this idea—namely, that tattoos made the slave impossible to sell later, since he wore a permanent mark of infamy on his face.
Their interiors had a sense of lightness as well: Egyptian interiors spanned only as wide as the timbers they could find to support the roofs; otherwise, they needed thick columns. The Romans utilized vaulted arches and achieved rooms up to 90 feet wide, with no columns breaking things up.
Roughly 80 percent of people in town Pompeii during the initial blizzard of ash and cinders, and the large majority seemed to have survived. But roughly 2,000 stayed behind, and their delay—from fear, stubbornness, or greed—doomed them. Further explosions led to fiery rocks clattering down, as well as thicker ash. Indeed, I was surprised to learn how heavy the ash at Pompeii was. New-fallen snow can weigh 70 kilograms per cubic meter (around 4⅓ pounds per cubic foot). Volcanic ash weighs at least ten times that, and up to 3200 kilograms per cubic meter (200 pounds per cubic foot).
As a general statement, Greek philosophy and arts thrived in part because the arts require a diversity of thought and even rivalries between nearby locations—which the small, independent Greek city-states had. In contrast, big public engineering works require centralized authority and concentrated wealth, a feature of the Roman Empire. Curiously, Renaissance Italy with its feuding city-kingdoms resembled ancient Greece far more than ancient Rome—and not coincidentally, the arts thrived there as well.
Beyond rehabilitating the reputations of Roman builders, who were often accused of not mixing their cement property, the MIT experiment has practical applications as well. Concrete is by far the most widely used construction material in the world, and manufacturing it contributes significantly to global warming. (Mostly because baking limestone (CaCO3) to produce quicklime (CaO) drives off CO2, or carbon dioxide.) If modern concrete lasted longer, humankind would need to use less of it, and emissions would drop.
Christianity owes much of its prominence to Roman roads as well. Although we (obviously) associate the origins of Christianity with Jesus, Mary, and the Twelve Disciples, it was really St. Paul—the one-time Christian persecutor—who spread the gospels to the masses and allowed Christianity to get a foothold in western Asia and North Africa. And when he wasn’t traveling on Roman galleons, Paul was zipping around the empire via the extensive road network. The many roads also enabled the swift delivery of his famous epistles.
In addition to building roads, Louisiana middle school teacher Nathalie Roy also has her students play ancient Roman boardgames. There’s one called rota that’s similar to tic-tac-toe. Another, called tabula, resembles Parcheesi, while yet another resembled backgammon. Boards for some of these games were carved into the pavement in city squares, like permanent chessboards in public parks nowadays. Above all, the Romans play dice games; Roy describes them as obsessed with dice. They also devised ways of cheating at dice, often by slicing dice open and inserting lead slugs.
The Romans knew of mineral poisons like lead, mercury, copper, and arsenic, but generally preferred botanical ones like henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake, hemlock, and opium.
The Romans had odd views about homosexuality among men. If one male penetrated another, the penetrator was considered virile and studly. But the penetrated was scorned as unmanly. In society’s eyes, only women got penetrated.
The benefits of Roman roads persist today. Even two thousand years later, cities situated along Roman roads remain more prosperous than cities not along the roadways, because those roads have provided consistent transportation for commerce century after century. At least in Europe. In North Africa and the Middle East, camel caravans largely replaced carts on roads by the year 600. Camels don’t need paved roads, so the economic effect dissipated.
When I visited the home of Janet Stephens to learn Roman hairstyling methods, I assumed at first that the dummies she owns had synthetic hair. That’s not the case. She says that brokers in China and Indonesia buy women’s hair for good money to make the mannequins; each one costs $350.
Half-jokingly, Stephens says that museums line up their busts in parade formation and never allow patrons to see the backs of them because most academics care only about identifying the person portrayed and not about other details of daily life that the busts reveal. “A lot of scholars are just star-fuckers,” she insists. “They worship celebrities.” Which is understandable, but it causes them to overlook a lot of great information.
The first lesson Stephens imparts is that, to a stylist, the head is not a sphere. It’s a cube with various planes: front, back, top, left, right. She uses those planes, along with the nose and ears as guideposts, to divide the hair into halves or quadrants, which are the basic divisions necessary to create different ‘dos.
Roman cooks typically prepared banquets for nine people. The crew for the Buckland feast had to serve nine times nine people, over eighty of us. But as the historian-cum-chef Sally Grainger explained—news to me—recipes don’t scale up linearly. That is, you can’t simply multiply every ingredient in a recipe by nine or whatever to serve more people. Each spice or herb has a different scaling factor.
However authentic the food, my fellow banquetters and I did not eat it the way the Roman did—with our hands, out of communal bowls. (Modern hygiene laws put the kibosh on that.) In medieval times, Grainger added, people generally grabbed food from communal bowls with the right hand, but brought all bites to their mouths with the left, to keep things separate. She suspects the Romans did something similar.
In addition to straight wine, the Romans also drank blends of ⅓ white wine vinegar and ⅔ water as a cordial. Apparently, it’s quite refreshing in the summer heat.
Over dessert, Grainger related an amusing anecdote. During a demonstration once, she gave a group of British schoolchildren three different versions of a dessert with nearly the same ingredients. The only difference was that one contained no salt, another one contained table salt, and the third contained the salty fish sauce garum. When she asked which one they liked best, the kids voted overwhelmingly for the garum version—until she told them that garum consisted of decomposing fish. At which point they all changed their minds.
At home, I tried a few different garums myself, one factory-made and one artisanal. The factory stuff tasted like fish sauce: salty, umami-rich, with mere hints of pisces. The artisan stuff was richer, fishier, more complex. The two garums looked different as well. The mass-produced stuff was light brown like tea and waterier: it ran when I dripped some onto a plate. The artisan garum was soy-sauce colored and more viscous; it beaded up instead of running.
As promised, here is a complete menu of the Roman feast that I attended at the Buckland Club meeting in Birmingham, England. Bon appétit.
ON ARRIVAL
Conditum paradoxum—A honey and saffron wine cordial, diluted with falanghina
BEFORE BEING SEATED
Epityrum—Olive relish with coriander, fennel, mint, and rue, with sourdough spelt bread
Melon balls and a garum dressing with mint, pepper, and honey
ON BEING SEATED AT TABLE
Stuffed Lamb’s Kidneys—with green coriander, fennel seed, pepper, and pine nuts
Sala Cattabia—A layered salad of sourdough bread with chicken, lamb’s sweetbreads, pine nuts, pecorino cheese, onion, and cucumber, with a dressing of raisins, ginger, coriander, and mint
Fish Patina—Flaked sea bass with scallops in a light egg batter with garum and rue
Roast Loin of Wild Boar—With roasted pine kernel sauce with cumin, celery seed, mint, thyme, and saffron
Cabbage with Leeks and Olives
Vitellian peas with egg yolks, ginger, and coriander
DESSERT
Peaches and plums in cumin and sweet wine sauce
Fresh fruit and nuts
You can read more about the meal, as well as peruse past historical dinner, at this link.
Chapter 7: California
The snobbery against acorns as food lingers today, and has prevented many scientists from recognizing just how vital acorns were as food sources. That’s especially true in Northern California and up the Pacific Coast. Given the rich abundance of salmon there, archaeologists long assumed that native people feasted on fish all day every day, and picked up grubby acorns only grudgingly, in dire circumstances. Nope. New archaeological evidence clearly reveals that acorn-eating predates intensive salmon-processing in many spots. One scholar called this bias against staple foods “salmonopia.”
To explain why people back then preferred acorns, some archaeologists invoke a distinction between “front-loaded goods”—which are hard to secure, but easy to prepare for eating—and “back-loaded goods”—which are easy to secure, but require laborious preparation to eat. In this schema, salmon are front-loaded: it takes a lot of work to catch and gut them, but once you place them on racks to dry, the sun does the rest. Acorns, meanwhile, are back-loaded: easy to gather, but a pain to process (crashing, leaching, milling, etc.).
This distinction matters because back-loaded goods are less risky for hunter-gatherers, who tend to roam about. If you put weeks of work in preparing salmon and don’t eat it all, you have to store it somewhere, and in the months that you’re away, the food could spoil or get stolen by bears or rival clans, or you could simply forget where you put it. All that work for naught. In contrast, if a cache of acorns gets stolen, ruined, or forgotten, it’s hardly worth a shrug. This might explain why hunter-gatherers relied so heavily on acorns instead of salmon.
In addition to tasting bitter, tannins also impart colors to foods. I found this out the hard way after processing my batch of acorns. The work left my fingernails dyed a rich red-brown, which no amount of scrubbing could remove.
Although a boon in terms of nutrition, the shift toward acorns as a staple food also led to big social changes among native Northern Californians. In particular, in conjunction with the arrow, this shift pushed women toward domestic, plant-based food production and men into hunting. Tribes were also more likely to compete and fight over resources after the shift, especially productive acorn groves.
In between the weevil-ridden acorns and the (very few) perfect acorns I gathered, there were a large number of acorns polka-dotted with brown spots, the equivalent of bruises on apples. As a good modern consumer, I of course recoiled at these at first and threw several into the trash. But working with stone tools soon changed my mindset.
It’s so much more work—and so much more your work, having done it with your own hands—that before long I couldn’t bear to let so much good, nutty acorn flesh go to waste. Why focus so miserably on a few rotten specks, instead of the 90 percent that’s still good? So eventually I began nibbling off the brown bits and spitting those alone into the trash, while dropping the remainder into my bowl to grind into flour.
With regard to the larval worms that live inside acorns: Laura Wolfer, the proprietor of Moose Ridge Wilderness School in Maine, where I learned to tan deer hides, has also processed acorns before. She keeps them in big heaps in her living room, and at times has seen escapee weevils wriggling free across the floor.
According to Wolfer, tannins can boost your health if eaten in small amounts, since they act as antioxidants. In large amounts, however, they’re toxic, albeit indirectly: they don’t harm your cells directly, but they do bind to minerals and nutrients in food and thereby prevent you from digesting them.
The most majestic oak trees produce fifty thousand acorns per year, roughly three hundred pounds’ worth. However, oaks are a mast species, meaning they produce a sizable number of acorns only intermittently, every two to five years. Oaks also tend to synchronize reproductive behavior with their neighbors. So in mast years, whole groves will be bursting with acorns, while in non-mast years, the groves are largely barren. This is probably an evolutionary survival strategy: squirrels and other critters can’t possibly eat every last acorn during mast years, which ensures that at least some acorns will survive and sprout new trees.
Later, long after I finished grinding out my one lousy cup of flour, I learned that some ancient people could grind out 1½ pounds of flour each and every hour with stone querns. The rate seems laughably productive to me, but perhaps people were made of sterner stuff back then.
As mentioned in the text, after eating my disgustingly bitter acorn muffins, I had a few questions: Had I screwed up somehow? Or did people way back when simply tolerate bitter flavors better?
To find the answer, I appealed to Laura Wolfer at Moose Ridge. Wolfer explains that I did indeed screw up. I should have soaked the acorns in water longer, at least a week instead of four days. More importantly, I should have grinded the acorns down in meal-flour before soaking. The rate of leaching depends on the surface area of what’s being leached: leaching therefore works better with smaller bits. So while tastes surely differed in ancient times, people then weren’t squirrels, simply indifferent to acorn bitterness. High levels of tannins probably tasted nasty to them, too. They simply knew how to remove them.
For daily meals, native North Americans turned acorns into nutritious, if bland, porridge by dumping the flour into watertight baskets and stone-boiling it. Ancient people relied on stone-boiling wherever they lacked clay pots and had to cook things in containers (dried gourds, watertight baskets, animal skins) that would burn up if placed in fires. So they heated stones instead, and used tongs to plop the stones into the skin/basket/gourd. (In Çatalhöyük, whose soil lacked abundant rocks, people used heated clay balls for the same purpose.)
I learned about stone-boiling from Wolfer’s assistant, Kate Wentworth. We first fill a dried gourd with chilly well water. Wentworth then tosses seven fist-sized cobbles into the firepit under some smoldering logs. (She explains that not just any rock will do. Rocks with high metal content work best, as do smooth rocks with small grains; rocks with cracks can explode when heated and impale you with shrapnel. In places like Alberta, Canada, the natives would transport good cooking rocks for miles and miles, because the local sandstone was poor for heat-cooking.) We know the rocks are hot enough when a flick of water sizzles on the surface; Wolfer adds that you can also spit on the rocks.
Now we have to move the rocks from the fire into the gourd, a tricky procedure. Wentworth shows me how with some primitive tongs, a two-foot-long stick split along most of its length; you pick things up by pinching the split ends together with your hand. Unfortunately, said pinching requires serious hand-strength. Wentworth, who lives in a cabin in rural Maine without plumbing or electricity and renders her own bear fat for fun, has plenty such strength. I, a professional typer, do not. Grabbing the cobbles feels like picking up a dumbbell with chopsticks, and while Wentworth can easily pinch and lift a rock with one hand, I resort to pinching the tongs with both hands like a child. It doesn’t help that the fire is scorching, hot enough to singe the hair off my knuckles. I keep dropping hot stones, then jumping backward as they tumble at my feet or splash into the gourd.
Despite my fumbling, the stones work brilliantly. After two rocks, the chilly well water is bath-warm. By rock three, the water is scalding. By rock seven, I’ve put the lie to the old proverb: I’m watching this pot closely, and it boils in seconds.
At this point, we could make the bland, nutritious porridge by dumping some acorn flour in, but Moose Ridge aspires to something more gourmet. Wolfer has me blend some acorn flour with corn meal, sunflower oil, and maple sugar, a dish that the Amerindians of Maine could have made from local ingredients. Then we slather a hot, flat cooking stone with more oil, and I dollop out little acorn pancakes, flipping them when the edges curl.
They’re delicious—nutty and crumbly, with a hint of sweet and a crackling caramelized top. My failed acorn muffins seemed downright embarrassing in comparison.
The Vikings thought it perfectly fine to win by subterfuge, and warriors even gained prestige by putting one over on the enemy. Some Viking trickeration strikes us as pretty dishonorable, like promising mercy on a besieged town if it surrendered and then slaughtering everyone the moment they opened the gate. But other tactics were near genius. One Viking general, after suffering a defeat, dragged the corpses of fallen warriors back to their retreat point and propped the bodies up on stakes. From afar, they looked like warriors in battle formation—the sight of which made the pursuing army hesitate. The Vikings thereby escaped to fight another day.
In chapter 1, Kayate dressed up as an ostrich to steal some eggs. The Indians of North America did something similar during hunting season by draping themselves with deerskins and painting their chests white. They used sticks for legs, and if the costume included antlers, they’d hollow them out to reduce the weight. Once they’d crept close enough, they’d fling the hides off and let fly with poison arrows.
A few of the tests that Harrison’s team ran had a medieval feel to them. At one point they tested the salve on dead cow eyeballs from a slaughterhouse, to see if it irritated delicate eye cells. They also applied the salve to some slugs in a standard test known as the mucus irritation assay. Basically, you dribble some chemical on a slug and see whether it produces mucus, a slime that protects it from threats. The more mucus, the more irritating and potentially dangerous the chemical is.
In fact, the word toxic is intimately tied to this weapon: A toxin is a deadly substance, while a toxophilite is someone who loves archery.
Beyond hunting with them, a few Indian tribes in California used certain toxins in puberty-initiation rites, because the toxins made them hallucinate. Most commonly, a respected matron would drop toxic ants onto the tongues of young males one by one with an eagle feather. After swallowing them, the youths would wander into the hills, find somewhere with commanding views, and wait for the Great Spirit to reveal their life’s purpose.
The chapter mentioned that bows and arrows replaced atlatls (the spear-chuckers) in nearly every culture on Earth. There were two big exceptions. In the arctic, where people hunted whales, seals, and walruses from small kayaks, the atlatl remained in use because people could throw it with one arm, and use the other arm to steady their vessel and keep from falling overboard. Arrows also never made inroads into Australia. The reason there remains mysterious—we simply don’t know why atlatls persisted.
Native Northern Californian tribes often burned the most beautiful baskets on funeral pyres, to make the sacrifice as poignant as possible. They also had special weavers called Suku, homosexual men who lived among women and decorated baskets with feathers.
With regard to fire, some scientists today talk about “Bambi syndrome”—the hard-to-dislodge idea in the public mind that forest fires are always evil. And to be fair, recent megafires in Australia, California, Canada, and elsewhere—driven by climate change and exacerbated by poor management in some cases—are pretty scary. But the truth is, there’s probably fewer fires burning now across the world than at any time in the past several thousand years, despite enormous booms in population. Far fewer people build daily fires to cook, keep warm, make goods, and manage forests. It’s just that in the past, fires were small and containable, whereas nowadays the ones that break out tend to be apocalyptically bad. Overall, as one observer put it, “it helps to think of fire as like rain”: healthy landscapes need both.
However gnarly I feel about giving myself a tattoo, I can’t surpass the likes of tattoo artist Daniel Riday or archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf, who not only tattooed far larger designs onto themselves, but tattooed themselves with needles made of bone—needles they fashioned themselves, no less.
Riday made his from a gannet bird. Deter-Wolf makes needles from deer skeletons. “I prefer to use bones with a little age to them, and that are already naturally macerated,” he wrote to me. Then he hangs them “in a wire screen cage (¼ inch to let insects through; positioned so raccoons can’t get to it) and let[s] nature work for a couple weeks.” Afterward, he degreases them and scrubs them down with a toothbrush. (People in ancient times likely used cane splinters, twigs, or sand.) After he finishes cleaning the bones, Deter-Wolf scores them with stone flakes, to control where they crack, and uses a hammerstone to drive a wedge in and split them into shards. He’ll scroop out any remaining marrow at this point, and grind the tips into points on sandstone. Pretty metal.
Recall that natives of the Amazon used a “toad test” to judge the strength of their special poison, curare: they’d prick a toad with some, and if it keeled over after a few hops, it was suitably powerful. They devised a similar test for monkeys: shoot them with arrows, and count how many trees they could scamper to before falling over. A two- or three-tree batch was ideal.
Curare kills by blocking the action of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. With acetylcholine blocked, skeletal muscles no longer contract properly: your eyes droop shut, your head lolls, and your legs go wobbly. In contrast, cardiac muscles, being different from skeletal muscles, continue to function, which means your heart doesn’t stop beating. Brain function continues as well. Unfortunately, your diaphragm is skeletal muscle, which means that as your legs go limp and you melt into a puddle on the ground, your breathing shuts down and you suffocate—all while being wide awake. A miserable way to go.
Remarkably, doctors have been using curare in medicine for two centuries now, albeit in tiny doses. During the early 1800s, before real anesthesia existed, curare kept patients limp during surgery and helped relax their abdominal muscles, making those thick muscles easier to slice through. Curare also acts as an antidote to poisons that cause severe muscle contractions, like strychnine and tetanus.
Chapter 8: Vikings
Better to fight half the battle with terror, because medieval swords were pretty mediocre weapons. Their sharp edges tended to blunt quickly, at which point they deteriorated into little better than giant butter knives to cudgel people. Warriors in the Crusades would make “armor” from linen stiffened by soaking it in wine mixed with salt, which should tell you how dangerous-like the weapons really were.
I used the name Cornelius in the chapter because Cornelius was an ex–Roman centurion mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as the first Gentile ever converted to Christianity. (Other traditions give this distinction to an Ethiopian eunuch.) Regardless, Cornelius was an early convert, and Christians in Europe back then believed he was first.
Viking-era people ate a lot of bread and a lot of porridge—or less, politely, gruel. The gruel was usually barley-based and could be spiced up with apples, hazelnuts, honey, butter, or stinging nettles, which added a spinach flavor, albeit with more zip. The era’s bread was a bit more interesting. It was coarse and chunky and sometimes baked into clover-shaped buns. In addition to oat, rye, or wheat flour, it might contain ground peas, bark, bone meal, mashed acorns, and roots or weeds.
For meat, Viking folk ate mostly pork, sheep, and fish, supplemented with occasional seals. But they didn’t dine on the giant, succulent roasted drumsticks you might be thinking of from LARP-y fairs and fantasy novels. Most meat was either broiled into watery gum in giant iron pots or dried into hard, greasy meat-biscuits that had little aroma and less taste. Cheese back then fell into an intermediate category—a tasty treat but also a medicine, something prescribed for scurvy, kidney stones, and general poor health. In fact, many medieval foods fell into this category of half-comestible, half-drug.
Vikings washed everything down with beer, mead, milk, water, or sometimes an acidic whey drink that was hell on the teeth. Especially when traveling, many drunk from hollowed-out cow horns. Much of their beer came from monasteries, which often brewed their own. That raises lots of giggles today but was standard practice back then.
Medieval recipes were not intended as guides for someone who’d never made the medicine before, but as mnemonic aids for those who had. The vagueness of the directions, then, wouldn’t have hindered practitioners. But even today people take it for granted how much implicit knowledge is required to cook. I overheard a story one day on the subway in Washington, where a woman began complaining about how hopeless her boyfriend was in the kitchen. A few days prior, she’d tried to teach him to cook pancakes. When the recipe called for an egg, instead of cracking it, he threw the whole thing in, shell and all. When she yelled at him, he pointed out—correctly—that the recipe never said to crack it open.
Although literacy in Europe was low in the medieval period, monks and priests could generally read and write. And as the written word grew in importance, especially in legal matters, monks began churning out fake documents to grant themselves titles to certain lands or bestow upon themselves special privileges. Usually the documents were illegally back-dated several centuries earlier, to make the privilege or land grant seem age-old, but modern scholars can see blatant anachronisms that expose the documents as fake. This was of course lying, which is a sin, but the monks justified it by claiming that gobbling up land for monasteries and churches served the greater glory of God.
In addition to the remedy in Bald’s Leechbook, doctors used onions to treat certain wounds during the French & Indian War.
Beyond finding overlooked remedies, another reason to study ancient medicine is to learn a more humane approach to treating patients. As the historian Christina Lee says, in medieval times, “There’s this idea that you never just heal the body—you always heal the soul.” Make what you will of that, but you don’t have to believe in souls to feel that, for all the miracles it’s wrought, modern medicine leaves many people unsatisfied. We wait for hours in windowless rooms for five minutes with Dr. Technocrat, who scribbles down some jargon and hurries off to order more tests. It’s cold, impersonal, dehumanizing. For all its quackery, medieval medicine never made that mistake.
One caveat with Treadway’s work: she looked at fresh tissue instead of bog-preserved tissue because she obviously didn’t have a thousand years to soak the bodies in muck to see if anything changed. And it’s always possible that the soaking and preservation process could warp or shrink the wounds in unexpected ways. But there’s no reason to think that bog would warp, say, dagger wounds but magically leave spear wounds untouched, or warp the different types of wounds in totally different ways. Skin is skin, and because Treadway was interested less in the absolute dimensions of the wounds and more in distinguishing one type of wound from another, her results still seem helpful.
Ancient Scandinavians performed some scary rituals with horses. Similar to scarecrows or voodoo dolls, they actually mounted skinned horses outside of castles sometimes, with the tails shoved into the mouths. Other European groups, like the Huns, ate a man’s horse at his funeral.
Importantly for raids, Viking ships had shallow enough drafts to get quite close to shore. This meant the Vikings could slip in, pillage, and zip away again quickly.
In an early example of experimental archaeology, a replica Viking vessel—based on a longship discovered in a mound in a farmer’s field in Europe—sailed across the Atlantic to North America in 1893 with a crew of eleven, and weaved through the Great Lakes to Chicago for the Columbian World Fair. She was 72 feet long, and 17 feet wide, with a mast 50 feet tall; nine-foot-high Viking figureheads decorated the bow and stern. According to the captain, the ship maneuvered beautifully in the water: “she kissed the seas as only a Viking ship can.” Still, the crew had a miserable journey overall. The ship leaked, and required constant bailing. And without modern insulation, it was freezing cold onboard; they had to keep the cooking fire burning at all times for warmth, which choked everyone with smoke. A good reminder of the travails of pre-modern travel.
Swords way back when did not exactly have knife-sharp edges. In the Byzantine Empire, warriors made armor by soaking linen in solutions of salt and vinegar. When dried, the cloth apparently got hard enough to withstand an attack from any blade. (You could still get bruised, obviously, but the swords couldn’t slice through.) A similar recipe involved salt and wine, about which one historian commented, “Now soldiers could use wine both inside and out to fortify themselves for battle.”
Poor pigs are something of a workhorse in any scientific field that investigates the properties of the human body. I’ve read papers that involved: burying pigs to study human decay; burning pork shoulders on pyres to understand human funeral practices; tattooing pigskins to study ink deposition; injecting anesthetized pigs with snake venom to study flesh putrefaction; and using mechanical chompers to investigate bite marks on skin for forensic work. You can’t help but flinch when reading some of these papers.
The consolation, I guess, is that such work might help us solve crimes or treat dying patients, at least in some cases. And I suppose it’s better than using humans. In one paper from the 1980s, a German researcher decided to study the path of bullets through flesh by shooting fifty bullets each into fifty different cadavers, including ten children.
Beyond all the organic material discovered in bogs, archaeologists have found plenty of metal objects, too: bracelets, rings, sickles, billhooks, pins, bridle bits, pendants, cauldrons, trumpets, and more.
I didn’t include this anecdote in the book, because the sources seemed sketchy, but reportedly, bog bodies are still being formed today. During World War II, a Soviet pilot named Boris Aleksandrovich Lazarev crashed-landed in a bog after his plane was shot down. The crash apparently destroyed his feet, but the rest of his perfectly preserved body was discovered 55 years later.
When German scientists stumbled across a bog body in 1871, they tried to preserve it by smoking the man like a Christmas ham. It worked pretty well—except the body shrunk to cartoonishly small proportions in the process. Nowadays, scientists remove the body from the ground while it’s still encased in peat, to maintain the acidic pH, then inject paraffin, beeswax, or artificial fixatives to squeeze out the water and protect the tissues.
In Holland in the 1700s, four bog bodies were ground into powder and consumed by the locals as medicine, much the way that people did with Egyptian mummies at the time. Any body that survived so long, the thinking went, must have powerful forces locked inside it.
Archaeologists can tell, via elemental analysis, that some bog-body victims grew up far from Denmark. Essentially, these people were discovered with flax and wool fibers on them, and the fibers contained different ratios of strontium isotopes than similar fibers would have in Denmark. The ratios were more typical of northern Scandinavia.
Although not found in a bog, Ötzi the famous Iceman from the Alps is another fascinating case of a body being preserved against long odds. Hikers discovered Ötzi in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Alps near the Italy-Austria border. No one quite knows how the body survived that long, given that the ice within glaciers—as well as any objects trapped inside—actually flows like slow-motion streams, moving roughly twenty yards per year. Indeed, most objects, due to differential pushing and pulling in different layers of ice, eventually get crushed or torn apart. Ötzi apparently got lucky, trapped in a mostly dead spot.
Ötzi’s skin revealed over five dozen tattoos, mostly small lines and crosses. In addition to the body, archaeologists found his clothes and a trove of artifacts alongside him. His clothes consisted of “a [bear-]fur cap, a hide coat, a grass cloak, leggings, a belt, a loincloth, and a pair of shoes.” The leather was so well tanned that it remains intact today. The artifacts included a copper axe, a birchbark container (possibly for stone-boiling food), two mushrooms on a thong, and charcoal (possibly to counteract plant poison).
In 2001, in a shocking discovery, archaeologists also found an arrowhead embedded in Ötzi’s shoulder. Closer examination and some chemical tests revealed other people’s blood on him as well. Before this, archaeologists assumed that Ötzi had simply gotten lost or caught in a storm and died of exposure. Now the focus shifted to murder. Given that the arrow wound had healed somewhat, the best current guess is that he got shot in a nearby village, fled into the mountains, and got hunted down and possibly beaten to death after a struggle.
In case you’re curious, the human skull is ¼ inch thick on average, but that varies from point to point. It’s just ⅙ inch at the temples and ⅓ inch in the back near the brainstem.
Again, some people have actually performed trepanations on themselves—removing parts of their own skull on purpose. The practice traces back to a Dutch librarian and LSD enthusiast named Bart Hughes, who attended a party one night in the 1950s. There, Hughes watched a musician named Titi stand on his head for 20 minutes. Hughes asked what the hell he was doing. Titi said he had no dope to smoke, and that a headstand got him high just as reliably
From there, Hughes developed a (dubious) theory that the hard plates of the skull restrict blood and nutrient flow into the brain, and thereby don’t allow it to pulsate and expand with our heartbeats. Somehow this confinement squashes the sort of “higher consciousness” that LSD seekers covet. So to recapture that state, Hughes got a hand-borer and opened up his own forehead. (You can see some startling pictures of the procedure here.)
Hughes also convinced a few disciples to trepan themselves. (Reportedly, John Lennon was interested.) I managed to track one disciple down, Joe Mellen from England. Mellen struck me as sweet, charming, funny, and utterly batty.
Early in life Mellen was on track to become a stockbroker until he fell under Hughes’s sway. Alarmingly, Mellen failed the first three times he tried to trepan himself. (Or four—he couldn’t remember exactly how many.) He was using a hand-cranked corkscrew drill, and couldn’t get enough leverage to grind through his own skull; he admits he also kind of chickened out. He described the struggle as similar to “trying to uncork a wine bottle from the inside,” a description I found both evocative and baffling.
After one failure, he went to the hospital—not for medical aid, but to see if the doctors on hand could do the procedure for him. His reasoning was: I’m going to do this anyway, so you might as well help me do it right. The doctors refused. So Mellen ordered a power drill for the forth (or fifth) attempt, and finally succeeded. (After his earlier failures, Mellen described the attempt with the power drill as a “doddle”—a trifle, quite easy.)
The resulting hole appeared on the centerline of his head, right where his baldness stops and the last wisps of his white hair start today. (The hole’s still soft, too, fifty-plus years later; during our conversation he gleefully pressed down on it like a deflated blister. While doing so, he said he can feel his brain pulsing to his heartbeat.) When I asked him if he had any memories of the procedure, he said, “there was kind of a schlurping sound as I took [the bone plug] out, and what sounded like bubbles.” (Believe it or not, this wasn’t even the grossest quote I encountered about self-trepanations. A woman named Heather Perry once told an interviewer that, after hers, “I had a [chest] cough, so I was a bit like a whale—every time I coughed, some fluid would come out of the hole in my head.”)
According to Mellen, the trepanation really did get him high. He spent the first hour post-procedure “cleaning up the mess” of blood and gore. Then he experienced, he said, “a feeling of lightness. I’m quite sure that it was relief from gravity.” The sweetness and joy continued to swell for hours, and was still present the next morning. “I thought, ‘My goodness, it’s really happened,’” he recalls.
Mellen later married a woman named Amanda Feilding who also performed a self-trepanation. Mellen and Feilding eventually divorced and remarried other people—at which point each one convinced their new spouse to undergo the procedure as well. And the initial joy he felt still radiates from him today. “I’ve been expanding my consciousness” through drugs and other means “for over 50 years,” he says, “and I really like expanding my consciousness. I like to have as much as I possibly can.”
After I finished my trepanations at Moose Ridge, Wolfer told me that the deer and pig skulls would be left in the woods for bugs and other scavengers to clean, then added to the Moose Ridge bone collection, which they use for educational purposes. I felt good about that—contributing to learning. But this also got me wondering: Did doctors in the past ever trepan animals for practice? After all, they had to start somewhere. And better to screw up on a dead beast than a live human.
The answer is maybe. A few years ago, archaeologists found a cow skull with a hole that looks very much like a trepanation. But one instance doesn’t prove anything. And beyond that, there’s no firm evidence of any ancient doctors practicing on animals.
Perhaps archaeologists in the distant future will find my deer and pig skulls and count them as the second and third known instances. Or perhaps the archaeologists will succumb to their usual practice whenever they find something odd—chalking it up to vague “ritual,” and conjuring up some deer- or pig-sacrificing cult in rural Maine.
Chapter 9: Alaska
Modern experiments have shown that, among available animal fats in ancient time, seal oil is one of the best for burning, because it melts at low temperatures and doesn’t contain too much connective tissue. Horse and cattle oil also burns bright and clean.
During their initial spread, the Thule were not moving into empty territory. Canada was inhabited by the Dorset people then, but all signs of Dorset culture vanished after the Thule’s arrival. No one knows why. Perhaps the Dorset people simply adopted Thule ways, or perhaps the Thule wiped them out.
Arctic people have physiological adaptations to the cold, including a higher base metabolic rate that allows them to burn more calories. Himalayan people also have metabolic adaptations to the cold, but while their adaptations aim to save energy and burn less fuel, arctic peoples simply run the furnaces hotter. That’s because food is scarce in the high mountains, while there’s often abundant fish and sea-mammal food on the coasts, provided you have the skills and tools to catch it.
Given the dearth of vegetables in the arctic, the Thule-Iñupiaq people traditionally ate copious amounts of meat. Processing all that protein produced excessive amounts of nitrogenous waste that the body must expel through urine; as a result, the Thule-Iñupiaq peed a lot. Due to a diet rich in omega-3 fats—which lower cholesterol but have anti-clotting effects—we know that modern Iñupiat who eat traditional diets have low levels of heart disease but also suffer a lot of nosebleeds.
Human beings have various types of neurons in our brains that help us navigate space, mostly located in or near the hippocampus. They have names like “place cells,” “head-direction cells,” “grid cells,” “boundary cells,” and more. One famous neurological report examined the brains of London taxicab drivers—who have to know the city’s labyrinthine streets in excruciating detail—and found that they had enlarged hippocampi. There’s never been a similar study of the Iñupiat, but among those who live traditional lifestyles you’d almost certainly find something similar, given their amazing navigational skills.
As for the rest of us, human beings are actually pretty good natural navigators—when we pay attention to our routes. But fewer and fewer of us do nowadays. For one thing, parents don’t allow their children to wander as much anymore. Between 1971 and 2010 in England, one study found that the number of children allowed to walk somewhere alone dropped from 94 percent to 7 percent. Another study asked kids to draw maps of their neighborhoods. Kids who were driven everywhere drew sad, impoverished things with pitiful amounts of detail compared to kids who biked and walked. GPS has only accelerated these trends. Instead of using our brains to plot our courses, now we’re led around by the nose. Fewer people get lost, no doubt, but we lose a sense of place—the colors, shapes, the immediacy of engaging with a landscape.
Shishmaref made headlines a decade ago as one of the very first potential casualties of climate change. The lack of sea ice recently has left the spit of sand it sits on vulnerable to storms, which devour the soft coastline and cause homes to collapse into the sea. So in 2016, the town voted to up and move from the spit to the mainland. However, instead of moving, the town rallied and erected a stout seawall. For now at least, the village remains proudly in place.
At least some arctic people in Greenland began working iron in the 700s AD, producing harpoons and uluit (the plural of ulu). They obtained the iron from a meteor that struck down five thousand years ago and produced an 18-mile-wide crater. People in southwest Alaska worked copper as well. But metal goods did not exist throughout most of the arctic.
Some anthropologists have noted an amusing contrast in how different cultures named landmarks in the Americas. Brownnosing European explorers tended to name them after monarchs or cronies back home—which was politic, but didn’t really help you find your way around. Native Alaskans never did that. Their names—“the lake with the light-colored bottom that shines,” or “two islands that look like buttocks”—were both functional and evocatively descriptive.
In case you’re curious, there’s a simple way to tell whether a deposit of clay is high-quality or future crudware. Roll it up into an O-ring, and pinch the loose ends together. If it’s good clay, the ring will be stretchy. If it’s crap clay, it will break. To find clay, search along geographic cuts into the earth, like rivers, streams, eroding cliffs. After it rains, clay will look shiny and smooth, with no contaminating bits of rock.
For brevity, I skipped over some steps in making Alaskan pots. Most importantly, before forming the pots, you add wood shavings for temper. (Temper provides space in the clay for water to escape as the pot dries. This makes the bursting of the walls less likely.) Native Alaskans sometimes used hair or plant fibers or even feathers as temper in their pots.
The student’s errand to the vet to pick up doggy bags of blood also led to some lively talk in the courtyard over the best places to source blood. For one pottery experiment, Harry attended the slaughtering of a hog, and she swears she’ll never do that again.
Chapter 10: China
The ancient and medieval Chinese were accomplished sailors, easily able to reach the eastern coast of Africa and the Persian Gulf. However, they mostly refused to sail east from China into the Pacific Ocean. Why? Because many Chinese people believed that a Giant Drain existed there, and that their ships would be pulled down to their doom.
Using sugar as a spice isn’t as crazy as it sounds. It balances the bitterness of foods like Brussels sprouts, as well as promotes the famous Maillard reaction, where sugars and amino acids fuse to produce scrumptious flavors. Some doctors back then also classified sugar as medicine. After all, it caused marked physiological reactions like a flushed face and racing heart. Think about that the next time you crack open a pop or nibble a candy bar.
One of the greatest head-scratchers in world history is this: Given that China dominates the history of science and technology, why didn’t industrialization begin there? And what about the Scientific Revolution? Why did those movements begin (mostly) in Europe?
There are no simple answers, or at least no answers that are both simple and correct. But historians have floated some ideas. For instance, the Industrial Revolution began in cold, miserable England, which had few people and therefore a labor shortage. Rich, civilized, and highly populous China did not have a labor shortage. So despite all the clever individual inventions, there was no need in China to systematically adopt labor-savings devices or switch to mechanical power, because there were also people around to do whatever needed doing. (Although technologies like the printing press undermine this argument.)
As for science, the Chinese had brilliant geometers, but for whatever reason, algebraic mathematics languished there—and algebraic mathematics played a key role in the Scientific Revolution. (Although, much of algebra actually began in the Middle East, which again undermines that argument, or at least raises more questions.)
Other explanations include differing religious attitudes in China and Europe, as well as the influence of capitalism in Europe. I stress that none of these explanations suffices on its own. But they’re fascinating to consider in a counterfactual way. If China had maintained its technological momentum, developed modern science, and reached North and South America from the West before Europeans did from the East, the world would look vastly different today.
Summoning a priest perhaps isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Bertrand knows at least one account of a priest who led a trebuchet unit in battle. He’d preach fire and brimstone beforehand, then blast away at the enemy. As Bertrand said, “I guess military leadership was a bit looser then. A priest could just lead an artillery unit.”
Incidentally, here’s where you can find videos of the Utah trebuchet in action.
With regard to how trebuchets work, I skipped over one subtlety, in that there are actually two different kinds of counterweight trebuchets. In fixed-weight trebuchets, the counterweight is essentially bolted to the end of the seesaw beam arm. In swinging trebuchets, the weight hangs in a giant wooden bucket or bin. Fixed-weight trebuchets required hauling several tons of lead or other dense metals around—a huge pain. Swinging bucket/basket trebuchets could be filled with sand or stones on site, a much more attractive option. Of course, ruthless army officers like Jiaolong could also strip lead from temples or other buildings.
Europeans came up with several creative trebuchet names, but the Chinese were equally inventive with the names of their gunpowder-fueled rocket-launchers, which they typically rolled from spot to spot in wheelbarrows (another Chinese invention). Names for different rocket-launchers included “Mr. Facing Both Ways rocket-arrow firing-basket,” “Five tigers springing from a cave,” “Pack of 100 tigers running together,” “Hawks Catching Rabbits,” “Leopard pack unexpectedly scattering,” “Vast-as-heaven enemy exterminating Yin-Yang shovel,” and the “Thousand-ball thunder-cannon.”
You can see videos and photos of the trebuchet firing here.
During medieval sieges, if the assailants tried mounting the walls with ladders, the besieged could use special forked sticks to push the ladders away and topple them backwards. They could also drop down stones, scalding-hot sand, and buckets of boiling water. But despite what you’ve read in fantasy novels, they probably wouldn’t have dumped boiling oil. Oil was simply too expensive to waste like that, not when you could consume it. Boiling water was far cheaper and injured people nearly as well.
A bride with the coveted three-inch feet was deemed a golden lotus. Brides with four-inch feet were called silver lotuses, and were considered acceptable to marry. Brides with dreaded five-inch clompers—iron lotuses—were lucky to find husbands.
Sometimes the families of a recently sliced eunuch would forget to ask for the severed penis-bao, or didn’t realize they should. In those cases, a crooked knifer would sell it to eunuchs who’d lost theirs. Bao were also sometimes rented out for funerals(!), apparently in the hopes that the eunuchs could fool the god of the underworld.
Regarding Sun Yaoting, the last Chinese imperial eunuch: Eunuchs for hundreds of years before him served the emperor in the so-called Forbidden City in Beijing. Today, the Forbidden City is open to the public as a museum. A few hundred stray cats live on the grounds as well, and to keep the population in check, the staff spays and neuters them. Which means that the tradition of eunuchs in the Forbidden City still lives on today.
If you want to listen to my podcast about eunuchs, you can do so here. There’s also a bonus episode through patreon.com/disappearingspoon about Sun Yaoting, the Chinese eunuch who lived until 1996.
Part of why alchemy seems so confusing today might arise from the fact that there are something like 170 different names for the Philosopher’s Stone in the alchemical literature, because alchemists often invented baroque codes to conceal the true meaning of the experiments they recorded in their notebooks. Every separate substance (gold, mercury, iron) and chemical process (dissolving, evaporating, etc.) received a different symbol—kings, dragon, doves, eggs, wolves. The texts end up reading like dada fairytales, with passages about lepers hanging from golden gibbets, crows flying through graveyards sewn with grain, the Sun marrying the Moon, serpents eating their own tails, and so on. Each line seemed pregnant with meaning, yet frustratingly elusive for non-initiates.
Partly because greedy kings had already chopped down most old-growth forests. Given the scarcity of giant trees, ship masts sometimes doubled as trebuchet arms.
Chapter 11: Aztec
There’s a common legend that the Aztec viewed the invading Spaniards as gods. And truth be told, that would explain some puzzling aspects of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, including why the emperor Moctezuma (a.k.a., Montezuma) dithered and dallied and did so little to combat the Spanish threat at first. That said, most historians consider the story a myth. The head conquistador in Mexico, Hernán Cortés, never once mentioned it in any writing or oral testimony. That’s telling, because Cortés was not exactly a modest fellow; had the Aztec declared him a god, he would have trumpeted it from the rooftops. As far as historians can determine, the story was invented in the 1550s, decades after the conquest, as part of a propaganda campaign to justify Spanish rule.
The Aztec had almost certainly heard about the Spanish before their invasion, as rumors about strange, bearded men began appearing in Mexico in the early 1500s. The men had sailed from unknown lands in canoes as tall as temples, and rode alarming “deer” (horses) around on land. Then a trunk washed up in the Yucatán with cloaks, jewels, and a sword inside—goods never before seen in Mexico. Not long after that, a series of omens appeared—fires, floods, a comet—which the Aztec believed foretold a great calamity. (They weren’t wrong.)
The most stunning part of the rumors was about the foreigners’ white skin, like the underbelly of a fish. That said, the Aztec had seen people with white skin before, as albinos were sometimes born there. Typically, however, such people were dragged to the emperor’s palace and dumped in a zoo for people to stare and point at.
The famous Aztec emperor Moctezuma bathed two to three times per day in a basin in the center of a maze in his palace—both for privacy’s sake, and so that no one could sneak up and assassinate him.
The Aztec had far more advanced mathematics than the Spaniards, who were still using clunky Roman numerals when they invaded. The Aztec had the concept of zero, even. In general, the Aztec also embodied several Christian ideals far more thoroughly than the Spanish invaders ever did—compassion, thrift, obedience, courage, grace. They also loathed laziness and deceit. None of that mattered in the conquistadors’ minds, of course, especially when they could point to human sacrifice and cannibalism as evidence of Aztec barbarity.
I found this quote thought-provoking, about how different cultures from the past would view our modern sporting culture today. The author imagines someone time-traveling from an ancient civilization to a Super Bowl or World Cup final. Beyond being obviously bewildered, they’d immediately pick up on very different things:
“An Aztec remembering his own religious ball game of ollamaliztli might wonder why the losing team is not sacrificed and eaten as soon as the match is over. A Roman would be intrigued by the fact that no emperor is present to preside over these games, which he must have surely paid for, or why the crowd does not acclaim him. A Greek would suppose that this must be a funeral rite for some dead hero. A medieval knight might imagine that this was some very crucial and decisive trial by ordeal for a very noble lady or queen accused of the highest crime, adultery perhaps. A great military commander from a past heroic age might surmise that this was a combat engagement of some sort carried out by two teams of champions to settle some dispute, in order to avoid all-out war and bloodshed by the two armies of spectators.”
You can find the entire essay here.
There really wasn’t any other place to put this, so I’ll drop it here:
Cotton originated in the Americas, and it was so much smoother and less itchy than wool, that it quickly took over European markets. This incensed French woolmakers, who quickly succeeded in obtaining a ban on the newfangled fiber. But the ban, alas, did nothing: people wanted cotton and continued to use it. So some woolmakers came up with a creative plan. They decided to buy cotton clothing and dress French prostitutes in it, then send them all over the city, knowing that no self-respecting Frenchwoman would wear the same material as a common street-walker. The plan was never put into practice, however.
Mesoamerican people have been nixtamalizing corn for thousands of years. At first, they probably used wood ash to create the high-pH solution, the same substance that ancient tanners soaked hides in. Later, they switched to lime. After conquering Mexico, the Spanish brought corn back to Europe, but neglected to import nixtamalization and its nutrient-unlocking chemistry. As a result, in places where cheap corn became people’s main source of calories (e.g., rural Italy), their bodies were starved of nutrients and they developed a disease called pellagra. Pellagra is characterized by a trio of harsh symptoms called the three D’s—diarrhea, dementia, and dermatitis (rashes)—as well as a fourth D, death. Pellagra later plagued the American South as well. But native Mexicans never suffered from pellagra because of nixtamalization.
Again, Hernán Cortés made one attempt to launch trebuchet balls at the Aztec, an attempt that ended in humiliating fashion as the ball flew straight up and crashed back down on the machine. However, Cortés insisted, however dubiously, that he was actually glad about the failure, since the machine would have unleashed untold destruction on the Aztec, and he was kind-hearted enough to want to spare them.
It also seemed ironic to me that the Spanish abhorred the practice of human sacrifice among the Aztec, and especially the cannibalism that sometimes accompanied it, despite the fact that Christianity itself was built on God the Father sacrificing his only begotten Son, as well as the ritual consumption, in the form of transubstantiated hosts and wine, of Jesus’s body and blood.
The tortilleria mentioned in the book, Maizajo, uses only heirloom corn. The proprietor Muñoz says that modern corn is too difficult to nixtamalize: the kernels swell grotesquely because they absorb too much water and therefore need 50 percent more lime than normal, which isn’t great for human health. The chefs can’t cut back on the lime, either, because bacteria would otherwise infect the mix and ferment the batch.
When they first wandered down into Central Mexico, the Aztec were despised as lowly immigrants: they lived on pestilent land and subsisted on snakes and lizards. But when a war broke out nearby, they came to the aid of a powerful king, providing crucial reinforcements. In gratitude, the king gave the Aztec a daughter of his, on the promise that they would marry her to their god Huitzilopochtli and worship her. Before long, the king received an invitation to the nuptials. He arrived a few days later to find that the Aztec had not only sacrificed his daughter but had skinned her to make a costume, which a priest was dancing around in. Outraged, the king attacked the Aztec, driving them off the land. It was at this point that the Aztec settled on the marshy swamp island where they eventually built Tenochtitlan.
Many Native American groups crushed dried grains into flour by hand, a process I got to try in Karen Harry’s lab in Las Vegas (the same place I made the pots using seal blood). To do so, I knelt down in front of a wide, flat, black-and-tan stone (the metate), and picked up another, smaller stone (the mano) to scrape back and forth. I first tried sunflower seeds, a common crop in the Americas. In my enthusiasm, I dumped a huge scoop of them onto the metate and jumped right in. It was a dumb idea. Ninety percent of the seeds went spilling onto the floor with the first stroke. Grinding works better with small batches.
Overall, though, sunflower seeds prove easy to grind: they split readily, and I had a decently fine powder within a few minutes. Grinding dried corn, on the other hand, was a beast. It was like trying to break down gravel. I used my whole bodyweight for leverage, and even then I could barely crack them; the mano skated right over as if they were ball bearings. I was soon actively sweating. Harry notes that women who ground corn for hours every day would have been some buff ladies—“arm-wrestling champions for sure.”
The ballgame survived in remote pockets of Mexico largely because the people there were flexible about the rules. Erecting permanent stone rings would have drawn the ire of Spanish officials, so players invented a version of the game that involved knocking the ball across your opponents’ endlines. People could then play in relative secrecy in fields and other open spaces. If Spanish soldiers wandered by, they could discard the ball quickly and go back to work.
You might be wondering why I didn’t just stay on the ground instead of popping up and down repeatedly. Unfortunately, if your hips or hands are still touching the ground when the other team returns the ball, that’s a foul. Three fouls, and you lose a point. There’s no avoiding the burpees.
The Aztec didn’t have the equivalent of modern prisons, places where they incarcerated people for punishment. (They sacrificed people instead.) That said, the Aztec did sometimes detain prisoners of war in cages or other structures before sacrificing them.
Interestingly, some scholars have linked human sacrifice in Polynesia to social stratification there and the rise of oppressive caste systems. In short, by examining societies across Polynesia, they concluded that human sacrifice did not drive the initial separation of people into upper and lower classes; but once such stratification did arise, human sacrifice exacerbated the inequality and often perpetuated it in future generations. It’s not clear whether these results applied to non-Polynesian states like the Aztec and their neighbors.
When they first wandered down into Central Mexico, the Aztec were despised as lowly immigrants: they lived on pestilent land and subsisted on snakes and lizards. But when a war broke out nearby, they came to the aid of a powerful king, providing crucial reinforcements. In gratitude, the king gave the Aztec a daughter of his, on the promise that they would marry her to their god Huitzilopochtli and worship her. Before long, the king received an invitation to the nuptials. He arrived a few days later to find that the Aztec had not only sacrificed his daughter but had skinned her to make a costume, which a priest was dancing around in. Outraged, the king attacked the Aztec, driving them off the land. It was at this point that the Aztec settled on the marshy swamp island where they eventually built Tenochtitlan.
Unlike the Aztec—who had powerful emperors, built elaborate palaces, and loved flaunting their wealth—other groups in Mesoamerica lived in relative equality. In particular, the fiercely proud Tlaxcalans, a group the Aztec never quite conquered, all lived in homes of the same size, and never constructed public monuments or pyramids. Their cities more closely resembled those of Çatalhöyük thousands of years earlier than their neighbors in Tenochtitlan.
To modern Westerners, snakes often symbolize death. Not necessarily to the Aztec. Snakes could also represent life and renewal since snakes shed and regrow their skin throughout their lives.
Regarding gunpowder: The sulfur for it was mined in places with volcanoes. And while it was rather cheap in such spots, the price skyrocketed as you moved farther afield. In Iceland, you could trade a barrel of raw sulfur for a barrel of flour or for 30 fish. By the time it reached mainland Europe, that same barrel set you back 30 barrels of flour, or 900 fish, a thirtyfold increase.
Saltpeter was either mined from rock outcrops or scraped from outhouses, pigeon cotes, and stables, since it can be found in feces and urine. In large cities, “nightsoil” collectors had the distasteful job of removing bins beneath outhouses and composting it to extract the saltpeter. They judged when the batch was ready to process more by touching and tasting the mixture: as medieval manuals noted, it should feel warm and have a spicy flavor. After this point, they purified the saltpeter by leaching and boiling it, as well as adding ingredients like blood and glue.
Again, there’s reason to doubt that technologies like guns provided an overwhelming advantage for European invaders in conquering the people of the Americas. The Mesoamericans had weapons and infrastructure far more menacing than anything in Africa, but while the American empires fell within decades of contact—allowing Europeans to become the dominant demographic in many places—African nations took centuries to quell, and Europeans managed only a shaky minority grip on power.
It’s not often mentioned, but the Spanish conquest of Mexico owed a huge debt to the Chinese. The Chinese first developed the compass and modern rudders that steered Spanish galleons across the ocean. The saddles and stirrups for their horses and gunpowder for their cannons also originated in China. The Spanish even made heavy use of crossbows in subjugating the Aztec, another Chinese innovation.
In contrast, the Chinese method of inoculating people against smallpox (which involved either snorting the crushed-up scabs of someone with a weak case of smallpox, or spending a skin-crawling night wearing the dirty longjohns of such a patient) had not yet diffused over to Spain. This allowed smallpox to run rampant in Europe, and made it easily transmissible to Mesoamericans.
In general, medieval gunpowder recipes contained less saltpeter and more sulfur than today, partly because saltpeter was the most expensive ingredient. Charcoal and sulfur provided the fuel to burn, while saltpeter, upon decomposition, provided a ready supply of oxygen to keep the reaction going.
P.S. If you got through all the notes, congratulations! Why not drop me a line and brag a little…