Tea at Trianon: Ice Age Mammoth House

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

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Ice Age Mammoth House

From Live Science:

"This is a story about our human ancestors innovating to survive the coldest point of the last ice age and using all resources and materials that they had," Pryor said. "It would have been a challenging place to live, but they were making a success out of it."

The suggestion that the bone structure was used for storage and the pits around it as trash cans "are not Earth-shattering revelations, [but] they do provide useful insights into the lives of the people who once occupied the site," said E. James Dixon, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the study.

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The last ice age is a "fascinating time period in Eurasian archeology," Dixon told Live Science in an email, and the study "clearly demonstrates that modern humans were adapted to higher latitudes at the very height of the last ice age." The study was published online March 17 in the journal Antiquity. (Read more.)