Tea at Trianon: Ivory From A 16th-Century Shipwreck

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

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Ivory From A 16th-Century Shipwreck

From Smithsonian:

An interdisciplinary effort involving archaeologists, geneticists and ecologists, the paper was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. By extracting genetic material from the tusks’ cells, the researchers were able to identify the ivory’s source as forest elephants. The team then analyzed mitochondrial DNA to determine that the elephants whose tusks sank with the ship came from 17 distinct herds in West Africa.

“Elephants live in female-led family groups, and they tend to stay in the same geographic area throughout their lives,” lead author Alida de Flamingh, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tells Victoria Gill of BBC News. “We were able to reconstruct complete mitochondrial genomes from these really old samples.”

When the scientists compared their findings to genetic information about African elephants today, they could only identify 4 of the 17 herds. This decline probably reflects the extinction of elephant families long threatened by the ivory trade and the destruction of their habitats.

African forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins. Today, they continue to face threats from humans seeking ivory. According to the African Wildlife Foundation, poachers have killed more than 60 percent of the animals over the past decade; the species now occupies just a quarter of its historic range. Most forest elephants live in jungle environments, but a chemical analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in the 16th-century tusks showed that they once lived in a mixed woodland and grassland savanna. (Read more.)