Tea at Trianon: Modern Humans Only Colonized Europe on Their Third Try

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

Friday, May 19, 2023

Modern Humans Only Colonized Europe on Their Third Try

From ExplorersWeb:

A study in Plos One suggests that Homo sapiens needed three attempts across 12,000 years to finally wrest control from their predecessors. This slow-moving colonization took place between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, according to the paper’s authors, who studied ancient artifacts from caves in France’s Rhone Valley.

“The first two of these waves failed but the third succeeded around 42,000 years ago,” Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse, who is leading the excavations in France, told The Guardian. “After that, modern humans took over in Europe. The Neanderthals, who had evolved on the continent, died out.”

Slimak and his colleagues say they’ve found evidence that Homo sapiens arrived in Europe from western Asia. The colonizations took much longer than historians have previously thought, requiring travel along the Mediterranean before turning north toward the Rhone Valley. (Read more.)