Tea at Trianon: Early Humanity’s Toolkit

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 18, 2020

Early Humanity’s Toolkit

From Haaretz:

Stone artifacts painstakingly shaped into spheres were part of the daily lives of early humans for more than two million years. They have been unearthed by archaeologists in East Africa, humanity’s ancestral home, and they litter prehistoric sites across Eurasia from the Middle East to China and India. Yet experts have been puzzled by their function since the early days of research into our evolutionary history.

Now, an international team of archaeologists led by Tel Aviv University archaeologist researcher Ella Assaf, has produced evidence that these enigmatic artifacts were used for a very specific purpose: breaking the bones of large animals to extract the nutritious marrow inside. The study, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE, highlights how an elegant technological solution that allowed hominins to increase their calorie intake endured for hundreds of thousands of years and continued to be used even as our ancestors developed new techniques and created more complex societies. (Read more.)