paganchristianmathematician

Look at the eyes. In 2018 a genome study of 22 individuals from a Chalcolithic burial cave in Israel found a high frequency of the blue-eye variant, a trait that had been rare in the Levant and arrived with migration from Anatolia and the Zagros. The culture that carved this figurine around 4000 BC included a great many blue-eyed people, which makes the inlay look less like decoration and more like observation. The same study found something else. An abrupt demographic change in the region around 6,000 years ago. That matches the archaeology, where this culture stops rather than develops. The ivory, the copper, the underground villages, all of it belongs to a window that closes without warning.

A Roman family put this scene on their money. In 82 BC Caius Mamilius Limetanus struck a silver denarius showing Ulysses walking with his staff and reaching down to Argos. The Mamilii claimed descent from Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe, so the dog recognising his master was a statement about their own bloodline, circulating through the hands of Rome.

How do you date a painting when the paint is mineral and there is nothing to radiocarbon? You wait for the wall to fall off. When a painted flake spalls from the rock and gets buried in the shelter floor, the deposit around it can be dated. At Serra da Capivara, painted fragments have come out of layers dated to between roughly 10,000 and 8,800 years ago. The art is dated by its own wreckage.

You can see how this person walked. The oldest leather shoe in the world, from Areni-1 cave in Armenia, was worn and shaped to its owner’s right foot. The deformation sits at the heel and the big toe, which is exactly where pressure falls in a normal stride. Five and a half thousand years on, the leather still holds the shape of one person’s gait. And it survived because of sheep dung. The cave at Areni-1 stayed cool and dry, and a thick layer of accumulated dung sealed the deposit beneath it. The oldest leather footwear on earth reached us intact because livestock were kept in that cave for a very long time afterwards.