Tea at Trianon: Way Older Than Previously Thought

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, February 20, 2022

Way Older Than Previously Thought

From Smithsonian:

One of the reasons Vidal and colleagues came to the site was to learn about Omo I, one of the oldest known examples of Homo sapiens. Using geochemical clues to match the layer of volcanic ash blanketing the fossil to a specific volcanic eruption, they discovered Omo I is 36,000 years older than previously believed. Ash from an enormous eruption of the Ethiopian Rift’s Shala volcano was put down atop the sediment layer containing the Omo I fossil approximately 233,000 years ago, which means that Omo I and her kind lived here at least that long ago.

“Each eruption has a unique geochemical composition, a kind of fingerprint which we can use to try to figure out exactly which eruption on the Ethiopian Rift would have created a layer of volcanic ash,” Vidal explains. “We found a match for the ash layer that covers the fossils, so we know which eruption produced that ash and the age of that eruption.”

The findings, published this week in the journal Nature, show that Omo I had to be older than the layer that later fell from the sky to rest atop her remains, but they don’t reveal her maximum age. It may later be possible to determine the oldest possible date for Omo I if the team can similarly identify another volcanic layer from below the fossil. (Read more.)