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- Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
A witty and fascinating exploration of the limits of human knowledge of our planet, its history and culture, and the universe beyond. There are many, many things that nobody knows... Do animals have a sense of humour? Why do we have five fingers? What did Jesus do in his youth? Has human evolution stopped? Can robots become self-aware? What goes on inside a black hole? Bringing together The Things That Nobody Knows and Even More Things That Nobody Knows, this bumper volume takes us on a guided tour of 1,001 gaps in our knowledge of cosmology, mathematics, animal behaviour, medical science, music, art and literature.
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Also by William Hartston
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The Things That Nobody Knows
Even More Things That Nobody Knows
This collection first published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
The Things That Nobody Knows first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books.
Even More Things That Nobody Knows first published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books.
Copyright © William Hartston, 2011, 2015, 2017
The moral right of William Hartston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-074-9E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-075-9
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ
www.atlantic-books.co.uk
PREFACE
When Atlantic Books approached me in 2010 and asked if I could write a book containing 501 things that nobody knows, I was delighted to accept the challenge. Paradoxically, I had often felt that we learn more by thinking about the things we don’t know than the things that we do. It’s also much more fun. 501 unanswered questions later, The Things That Nobody Knows was born.
Three years later, they asked if I could do 501 more, which led to Even More Things That Nobody Knows, confirming that there is no limit to human ignorance. The book you are now reading comprises all the items from the earlier two books with one small amendment. Looking through the contents of both books, I found only one question that had been definitively answered and if you turn to item 200 from The Things That Nobody Knows, you will see what it is. On the plus side, this reduces the total number of Things That Nobody Knows listed in these pages from 1002 to 1001, which is a much more pleasing number. I hope you enjoy or are enlightened by at least some of them.
William HartstonCambridge 2017
How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)
CONTENTS
Introduction
Aardvarks
America
Ancient History
Antarctica
Anthropology
Armadillos
Australia
Bats
Bees
Biology
Birds
Black Holes
Boudicca
The Brain
Brussels
Butterflies
Cannibalism
Cartography
Cats
Chemical Elements
Chimpanzees
Christianity
Cleopatra
Climate
Coffee
Composers
Consciousness
Cosmology
Dinosaurs
Disease
DNA
Dodos
Dogs
Druids
The Earth
Earthquakes
Easter Island
Economics
Egyptology
Einstein
English History
English Language
Evolution
Football (American)
French History
Fundamental Particles
Games
Garlic
Genetics
Giraffes
The Greeks
Hair
Handedness
Human Behaviour
Human Evolution
Insects
Inventions
Jesus Christ
Judaism
Language
Magnetism
Mammals
Marine Life
Mathematics
Medicine
Memory
The Middle Ages
Modern History
The Moon
Mozart
Murder
Music
Musical Instruments
Numbers
The Old Testament
Olm
Painting
Palaeontology
Pandas
Penguins
Philosophy
Physics
The Planets
Plankton
Plants
Popes
Prayer
Prime Numbers
Proteins
The Pyramids
Quantum Physics
Reality
Rome
Sex
Shakespeare
Sleep
Smoking
The Solar System
The Sphinx
Spiders
Spontaneous Combustion
Squirrels
The Sun
Tardigrades
Unicorns
The Universe
Venus de Milo
Water
Weather
Worms
Writers
Writing Systems
Yeti
Zymology
and finally
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Ignorance, Fruit-Fly Genitalia and the End of the World
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld, 12 February 2002
The trouble with people like Donald Rumsfeld is that they give ignorance a bad name. The US Secretary of State for Defense was generally derided when he made the clumsy statement quoted above, but he was just trying to remember a line from Confucius quoted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854):
To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
With the wisdom of Confucius supporting him, Thoreau went on to ask:
How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?
While Rumsfeld was simply categorizing different levels of not knowing, Confucius and Thoreau had a much more positive approach to ignorance, an approach that provides the basic raison d’être of this book. I come to praise ignorance, not to bury it; for there is no better key to understanding the vast and ever-growing expanse of human knowledge. The topics covered in the forthcoming pages are exactly what the book says on the cover: things that nobody knows. Many people, when I have mentioned the title of the book, have unjustifiably assumed it to be another of those not-many-people-know-that collections of useless information. It isn’t. There may be a great number of such intriguing facts here, but they are only included when they are crucial to explain what nobody at all knows, and why nobody knows it.
More than three hundred years ago, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal likened our knowledge to a sphere which, as it grows larger, inevitably increases the area with which it comes into contact with the unknown. Henry Miller put this more succinctly in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941):
In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
This book is a guided tour around Miller’s horizon of ignorance.
When listening to scientists or other experts talking about the latest advances in their fields, I have always found it more intriguing, and generally more enlightening, when they get on to the subject of the things they don’t know. Rumsfeld’s known unknowns are what determines the direction of future research – and that is what makes ignorance so exciting.
According to a recent estimate in the on-line Ulrichsweb periodicals directory, there are around 300,000 academic journals currently being published around the world. These may come out weekly, monthly or less frequently, but the total number of issues of all these journals in any year must be over 3 million, and with an average in the region of ten papers in each journal, each reporting a previously unknown result, that adds up to over 30 million additions to our knowledge every year, which is around one every second. There has to be a vast amount of ignorance out there to keep all those journals in material, and the things that nobody knows that I have identified in the pages that follow only scratch the surface.
I ought now to write something about ontology, epistemology, Karl Popper’s concept of falsifiability, Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts and everything else that contributes to our ideas of reality, knowledge and what is knowable, but there will be plenty of time for that sort of thing later when we get on to the subject of philosophical unknowns. There is, however, just one more subject that I want to mention: fruit-fly penises.
Male fruit flies have tiny hooks and spines on their penises, the function of which – until recently – nobody knew. The standard way to resolve such a question would be to shave these bristles off and see what effect this had on the sex life of the subject. In the case of fruit-fly penises, however, the bristles are so small they can only be seen under a microscope, and even the best scalpel is too clumsy an instrument to attempt to use as a razor. At the end of 2009, however, researchers at the University of California published a paper describing a method of shaving fruit-fly penises with a laser. Not only could they shave off the bristles, but they could even perform the task with such accuracy that only the top third of each bristle was trimmed. By comparing the sexual exploits of unshaven, partially shaven, and totally shaven fruit flies, they could then tell everyone what they wanted to know. Answer: the sole role of the hooks and spines is to act as biological Velcro and keep the male fruit fly attached to the female during sex.
And until the paper was published, that is probably something that even Donald Rumsfeld did not know that he did not know.
After toying with various ways of organizing the material, I finally decided to settle for the most systematically arbitrary of all: alphabetical order by subject. Where appropriate, I have included cross-references to related topics at the end of the subject sections. These are introduced by the words ‘see also’, followed by the name(s) of the related subject or subjects and the numbers of the relevant unknowns. There are also cross-references embedded within the body of the entries, directing the reader to other entries that shed further light on the topic under scrutiny.
Before diving into the deep end of our pool of ignorance, I cannot resist concluding this introduction with an example of a question we know we can’t answer – at the time of writing, anyway. The question is
Will the world end in 2012?
More precisely, the question is whether the world will end on 21 December 2012, a date supposedly predicted by the ancient Mayans. The calculation is based on the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which must be the most complex way of counting our days that humanity has ever devised. Rather than expressing a date in three figures, as the day, month and year (originally chosen to correspond to the period of rotation of the Earth, and the orbits of the Moon around the Earth and the Earth about the Sun), the Mayans used five figures from interwoven counting systems. There were 20 days (called K’in) in a Winal, 18 Winal in a Tun, 20 Tun in a K’atun, 20 K’atun in a B’ak’tun. A Long Count ended after 13 B’ak’tun. Multiply all these together, and you get 1,872,000 days in a Long Count, after which it starts again. That’s just over 5,128 solar years, and since the Mayan calendar began on 11 August 3114 BC, the calculations mean that it will reach its end on 21 December 2012 (remember there was no year zero in our calendar).
Actually the Mayans did not predict the End of the World on that date, nor even a great cataclysm, and some say the date had no more significance than any 1st of January, but it’s a good excuse for a blockbuster movie, and NASA has been plagued with phone calls from people who believe in it, some even saying that they are contemplating suicide to avoid the horrors that the End of the World may bring.
So the good news is that the world will probably not end in 2012, but we shall definitely know whether the prediction is correct on 22 December of that year.
To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845)
AARDVARKS
1. Is the aardvark the closest living relative of a creature from which all mammals evolved?
In 1999 scientists sequenced and analysed the complete mitochondrial DNA of the aardvark, an unprepossessing, somewhat comical ant-eating creature from Africa, whose name is Afrikaans for ‘earth pig’. The results showed that the aardvark may be the closest living relative of the ancient ancestor of all the placental mammals – that is, all mammals, including ourselves, apart from marsupials and the egg-laying monotremes (such as the duck-billed platypus). Surprisingly, the genetic make-up of the aardvark is closer to that of the elephant than the South American anteater, which shares its taste in food and its general appearance.
Research suggests that the chromosomes of the aardvark have undergone relatively little change since placental mammals first evolved over 100 million years ago, but how close the first placental mammal was to the aardvark of today is unknown.
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Sir Karl Popper (1902–94)
AMERICA
2. Who were the first people to populate America and how did they get there?
Until very recently, the so-called Clovis people were thought to have been the original human inhabitants of the Americas and thus the ancestors of all later indigenous people in both North and South America. The Clovis people were named after the town of Clovis in New Mexico where evidence of their existence was first detected by archaeologists in the 1930s. A distinctively shaped spear point found there became the identifying feature of the Clovis culture, and similar items were later found in many other places. The most generally held theory was that the Clovis people had come from Asia some 13,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, following herds of animals across the land bridge that then connected Siberia to Alaska. The newcomers went on to establish the first human settlements in North America.
The ‘Clovis first’ theory, has periodically been disputed by claims of finds that may indicate a pre-Clovis population. Most recently, a large hoard of tools and artefacts was unearthed in Texas which appear to date back to 15,500 years ago, some 2,500 years before the Clovis people are thought to have arrived. Furthermore, the existence of huge ice sheets in North America at the time would have made travel by land from Asia unlikely, and the supporters of a pre-Clovis theory suggest that the original inhabitants arrived by sea, probably from Polynesia, arriving in South America and spreading north.
3. Who is America named after: Amerigo Vespucci or Richard Amerike?
For several hundred years, it has been generally assumed that America was named after the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who in 1499 sailed from Italy on a voyage of discovery to what is now known as Brazil. The earliest known use of the word ‘America’ is on a 1507 map by Martin Waldseemüller (→ CARTOGRAPHY 70), a map based mainly on information supplied by Vespucci. Yet there is no evidence that Vespucci himself ever claimed to have given the continent its name, and it is known that in later editions of the map, Waldseemüller tried to change the name to Terra Incognita (‘unknown land’).
From the 1960s, however, evidence began to accumulate in support of an alternative theory regarding the origin of the name ‘America’. It all began with the discovery of trading records concerning a Welsh merchant, Richard ap Meryk, who had anglicized his name to Richard Amerike on setting up business in Bristol in the late fifteenth century. Salt cod, in those days, was big business, and the Bristol fishermen brought a good deal of it from Iceland until that trade was stopped by the king of Denmark in 1475. They then sought out new fishing grounds, and the records support the idea that they found what they were looking for off the coast of Newfoundland. This discovery, naturally enough, they kept secret, but Amerike is known to have been a major supporter of John Cabot’s voyage of discovery to North America in 1497.
It is now known that both Columbus and Vespucci had copies of Cabot’s map. The only question is whether Cabot had already named the new land after his sponsor Amerike. Intriguingly, one more piece of the jigsaw has been wedged in to fit that theory: Amerike’s coat of arms. This coat of arms includes stars and stripes, and his supporters say that it inspired the American flag. That is possible, but unlikely: the stripes on Amerike’s version are vertical, not horizontal; there are only three stars; and as well as red, white and blue, his coat of arms includes a prominent element of mustardy yellow.
4. Did the Chinese discover America before Christopher Columbus?
In 2002 the retired British submarine commander Gavin Menzies published a best-selling book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, in which he argues that Chinese explorers not only reached America long before Columbus, but also discovered Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica – and even circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. His claim is that fleets of massive junks under the command of the eunuch-admiral Zheng He performed all these feats at the behest of the Chinese emperor. Although some historians denounce his claims as pure fiction, with no evidence to back them, Menzies says they explain some early European maps that appear to give accurate details of lands that were supposedly undiscovered at the time.
In 2006 a map was unveiled in Beijing that had recently been discovered in an antiques shop. The map included Chinese characters stating it was drawn by Mo Yi Tong and copied from a map made in the 16th year of the reign of the Emperor Yongle, which was 1418. This map included Australia and other lands supposedly unknown at the time. Three years later, in 2009, some more Chinese maps came to light. These claimed to be copies of fifteenth-century originals, and had been collected by the late Dr Hendon Harris Jr, who in 1973 had published a book on discoveries supposedly made by early Chinese mariners. Harris went much further than Menzies, suggesting that the Chinese had reached the Americas around 2200 BC and were the ancestors of the Native Americans.
5. What happened to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World, and the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island?
Virginia Dare, born on 18 August 1587, was the first child born in the Americas to English parents, Eleanor and Ananias Dare. She was born into the colony established that year on Roanoake Island, in what is now North Carolina. The settlers, who were sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, were led by Virginia’s maternal grandfather, John White. Not long after Virginia was born, the colonists ran short of food, and White returned to England seeking fresh supplies and support. But when he returned three years later, the entire colony had disappeared. Before White’s departure, the colonists had agreed to carve a cross if they were in distress or under attack, or, if they decided to move the settlement, they were to carve the name of their new location. White found no cross, just the letters ‘CROATOAN’. Croatan Island, not far from Roanoke, was the home of the friendly Croatan tribe, but with the onset of equinoctial storms, White was obliged to return to England without ever establishing the fate of his granddaughter, or any of the other settlers.
Theories to account for the disappearance of the colonists range from drowning, cannibalism and Spanish aggression to peaceful assimilation into the local tribes, but their exact fate remains uncertain. The Lost Colony DNA Project is currently trying to compare the DNA of relatives of the Roanoake colonists with DNA taken from people with Native American ancestry to try to determine whether the colonists died out completely, or ‘went native’ and interbred with the local people.
6. How did Davy Crockett die?
As everybody knows, Davy Crockett died heroically fighting the Mexicans under Santa Anna at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Or did he? There are two very distinct versions of Crockett’s death:
(i) According to a black slave named Ben who cooked for Santa Anna’s forces, Crockett’s body was found at the Alamo, surrounded by at least sixteen Mexican corpses, with Crockett’s knife deeply embedded in one of them. That seems to tally with the usual story.
(ii) According to other accounts of the battle, around half a dozen Texans surrendered to the Mexicans and were promptly executed by Santa Anna. Some say that Crockett was among them. This version is supported by the memoirs of a Mexican officer named José Enrique de la Peña, who asserted that Crockett did not die in the battle. The authenticity of these memoirs has been disputed.
7. Did Custer’s Last Stand ever really take place?
What really happened on 25 June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where General George Custer and his men were wiped out by Chief Crazy Horse and his Sioux braves? The usual tale highlights Custer’s heroism when, heavily outnumbered, he and his men shoot their horses and pile them into a barricade (leave out the shot horses if this is being filmed for purposes of family entertainment) and withstand the Red Indian hordes until they are all killed. Since all Custer’s 210 men were wiped out, however, all accounts of his Last Stand have come from the other side, and all the early accounts were made at a time of delicate negotiations between the Sioux and the US government, when there were advantages to be seen in portraying Custer in as heroic a light as possible.
Investigations of what is now known as Custer Hill have led to strong disagreement about what happened. The large number of bodies found there, together with other evidence, has been taken by some to support the story of the barricade and the hopeless but heroic Last Stand. Analysis of the positions of spent cartridge cases, however, has suggested to some a picture of men in a panic, running and shooting wildly in all directions, including into the air and into the ground. Later accounts by participants on the winning side have also suggested that it was all over quite quickly, ‘in the time it takes a hungry man to eat a meal’, as one is quoted as saying.
ANCIENT HISTORY
8. Did Atlantis ever exist?
In the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote of the lost city of Atlantis, an island that ‘disappeared into the depths of the sea in a single day and night’. He placed it somewhere around the Straits of Gibraltar, and the legend of Atlantis has been with us ever since. Historians have generally given little credence to the tale, pointing out that the invention of imaginary cities was a common literary device of Plato’s time – but that has never stopped speculation and occasional expeditions in search of Atlantis.
In 2009 there was a report of images of a vast rectangular grid on the Atlantic seabed, which Atlantis-lovers saw as evidence of a lost city. Unfortunately, closer examination suggested that the grid was an image created by the ship that conducted the survey. More credible was a recent survey by archaeologists and geologists of the marshlands of the Doñana Park near Cadiz, Spain, using deep-ground radar, digital mapping and underwater technology. This revealed what could be a city buried in mud by a tsunami. That interpretation is reinforced by the discovery of sites said to be ‘memorial cities’ built by the survivors. This is hardly the city under the sea described by Plato, but he places its destruction at around 10,000 years before his own time, so the Spanish site, which dates from 6000–5000 BC, could be the origin of the Atlantis legend, even if it was several thousand years later than Plato’s estimate.
9. What did the people of the Magdalenian culture, who lived in Western Europe around 15,000 years ago, do with the cups they made from human skulls?
In the fifth century BC the Greek historian Herodotus, in his description of the Scythians who lived on the far side of the Black Sea, relates how they drank from the skulls of their enemies. There have been similar accounts from other cultures, but there was little material evidence until archaeologists investigating Gough’s Cave, a Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) site in Somerset, uncovered fragments of both human and animal bones – including forty-one pieces of human skull. These pieces, when pieced together, were found to be from half a dozen individuals, and showed what the researchers described as ‘meticulous shaping of cranial vaults’: the skulls had been worked into the shape of cups. However, the archaeologists were unable to tell whether these ‘cups’ were actually used for drinking, or whether they played a part in some other ceremony, such as a burial ritual.
10. What did the Minoans call themselves?
From around the twenty-seventh to the fifteenth century BC, the Minoans on the island of Crete were one of the world’s most advanced civilizations. Their buildings, their art (which influenced that of both Greece and Egypt) and their ability to recover from natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all attest to a high level of organization and administration. Yet their ethnic origins and language remain unknown, and their writings, in the script known as Linear A, have yet to be deciphered. All of which contribute to the fact that we do not even know how they referred to themselves. It was certainly not ‘Minoan’, a term invented by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans after the mythical King Minos of Crete, who kept the Minotaur in his labyrinth – a story possibly inspired by the elaborate cellars of the Palace of Knossos, which Evans excavated in the early years of the twentieth century.
See alsoWRITING SYSTEMS 494
11. Who was the victor at the Battle of Kadesh?
The Battle of Kadesh, fought around 1274 BC, was one of the greatest battles of history, and was said to have involved more chariots than any other battle, before or since. Kadesh is also the first major battle for which we have detailed accounts from both sides. In fact, it could be said that we know almost everything about the Battle of Kadesh except who won.
The battle was fought between the armies of the Pharaoh Ramses II of Egypt and Muwatallis, king of the Hittites. After misjudging the closeness of the Hittite forces, Ramses allowed his own troops to become split, leaving him vulnerable to a sudden ambush by the Hittites. By his own account, he was on the verge of defeat when reinforcements arrived and drove off the enemy. Both sides then retreated and a truce was signed shortly thereafter.
For the rest of his long reign, Ramses proclaimed Kadesh as a great Egyptian victory, while the Hittites were firmly convinced they had won the battle. Archaeological investigations have failed to produce evidence to support either side’s claim.
12. Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ever exist?
According to legend, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were built around 600 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon for his wife, Amytis of Media, in Iran, who was pining for the trees and plants of her homeland. The Gardens were written about and highly praised by Greek historians of the first century BC, which was about a hundred years after they were said to have been destroyed in an earthquake. The earlier Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC, is said to have included the Hanging Gardens in his own list of the Seven Wonders, but this list has not survived and there is no definite reference to the Gardens in any of his known writings. Curiously, neither is there any known reference to them in Babylonian writings of the time.
Since the site of Babylon was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, archaeological excavations have produced some evidence that match parts of some descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, but none of this evidence is sufficient to confirm their existence. One suggestion is that the Gardens never existed, but were just intended as a poetic device. Another suggestion is that they did exist, but were in Nineveh, not Babylon, having been built by Sennacherib of Assyria in the seventh century BC. The oldest of the Seven Wonders would then have been a confused amalgamation between Sennacherib’s real gardens and Nebuchadnezzar’s mythical version.
13. What caused the collapse of many civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean between the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age?
Between around 1200 and 1150 BC, as iron began to replace bronze as the favoured material for tools and weaponry, a number of civilizations around the Eastern Mediterranean suffered cataclysmic declines from which they never recovered.
In Greece, the great stone palaces of the Mycenean culture were all destroyed, in Egypt the period of the New Kingdom came to an end as the country reeled under foreign invaders such as the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’, while in the Near East the Hittite empire fell apart, and cities across the region were sacked or burnt to the ground. Various causes, both natural and human, may have lain behind such widespread collapse. There is some evidence of prolonged drought, and of earthquakes and volcanic activity, while some scholars have suggested that mass migrations (possibly connected with climate change) combined with the new iron-based weapons technology may have led to a heightened mood of militarism and a desperate drive for conquest. Or it could be simply that the civilizations that had emerged in the region over the previous two millennia had sown the seeds of their own downfall by becoming too complex to be sustained by the existing systems of rule and administration.
14. What was the original purpose of Stonehenge?
About 5,000 years ago, on Wiltshire’s windswept Salisbury Plain, the ancient inhabitants of Britain built a henge, a simple structure consisting of a bank, a ditch and some diggings known as the Aubrey holes. These holes, named after their discoverer, the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, are round pits in the chalk, each about 1 metre (3 ft) wide and 1 metre deep, with flat bottoms. Together they form a circle some 87 metres (284 ft) in diameter. Some cremated human bones have been found in the chalk.
The construction was then abandoned for about a thousand years until 2150 BC, when some eighty-two massive bluestones from the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales were erected on the site. The stones, weighing up to 4 tonnes, would have had to travel some 380 km (240 miles) from their original location, and much research and speculation has been spent on the question of how they were moved. The most likely method involved moving the stones on boats by river and sea, and then using rollers to move them across land. It has also been suggested that the stones may have been transported from Wales by the ice sheets thousands of years earlier, during the last Ice Age.
But what was it all for? It has been suggested that Stonehenge was a temple, or an astronomical observatory, or a centre of healing, or a place of human sacrifice – but with little known about the life or beliefs of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of these islands, there are few clues to go by.
15. What was the origin of the 260-day Tzolk’in calendar of the Mayans?
We have already encountered the ancient Mayan calendar in connection with whether the world will end in 2012 (→ INTRODUCTION), but the reasons behind its complex interweavings of numerical patterns are almost unfathomable. The combination of two different types of week, one of 13 days, the other of 20, to give a 260-day cycle running in conjunction with the 365-day year, is particularly baffling. The commonest – but by no means satisfactory – explanation offered is that the numbers 13 and 20 appear to have held some special significance for the Mayans.
It has been suggested that the 13-day week may relate to the lunar calendar, being the period between a new moon and a full moon. The trouble with this theory is that it doesn’t add up, as it would give a lunar month of 26 days instead of the more accurate figure of 29. Supporters of the theory respond by saying that you can enjoy the full moon on the day before and the day after too, so the full cycle is 13 days from new to full, 3 days of full-moon watching, then 13 days of a waning moon. Hey presto: 29. But even the Mayans must have felt there was something unsatisfactory about a 13-day lunar week, with the phases of the Moon starting 3 days later every cycle.
As for the 260-day cycle, one suggestion is that it is the period of human gestation, or at least the time between the first missed period and childbirth. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that Mayan midwives had a large influence on the calendar system.
16. Where did the Etruscans come from?
The Etruscans – the ancient inhabitants of Tuscany – were a major power in central Italy from the beginning of the Iron Age to the early days of the Roman empire. Indeed, it was the Etruscans who were largely responsible for turning the small village of Ruma on the banks of the River Tiber into the mighty city we know as Rome. Yet where the Etruscans came from has been a matter of dispute for more than two millennia. The ancient Romans maintained that their origins lay in Asia Minor; the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, believed they were an indigenous Italian race. The Etruscans themselves left no literature, no religious texts nor any other clues as to their origins, apart from some items found in graves and tombs. What little remains of their language makes it clear that it is not Indo-European – indeed, no similarity has been detected with any known language, alive or dead.
17. When did humans discover that the Earth is round?
‘They all laughed when Christopher Columbus said he thought the Earth was round.’ Those lyrics from the Ira and George Gershwin song have a good deal to answer for. By the time of Columbus, we had known for around two thousand years that the Earth was round. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras postulated a spherical Earth in about 600 BC and another Greek, the astronomer Eratosthenes, may not have been far out in his calculation of the radius of the Earth around 240 BC – and from that time, no reputable Greek thinker ever suggested that the Earth was anything but round. A few eccentric early Christian theologians reverted to a Flat Earth theory, on the grounds that the Greeks were pagans and therefore must be wrong, but they were always very much in the minority.
The ancient Greeks themselves disagreed as to who was the first to confirm the shape of the Earth, and we lack sufficient knowledge of the astronomical techniques of the ancient Greeks to make any kind of informed speculation. According to Diogenes Laertius, writing in the third century BC, Pythagoras was the first to write of a spherical Earth; according to Theophrastus, it was the philosopher Parmenides in the fifth century BC; and according to Zeno, it was the poet Hesiod around the start of the seventh century BC. However, none of these writers inform us of the grounds on which they make their claims.
18. What is the story behind the thousands of huge jars at the Plain of Jars in Laos?
In north-central Laos, in the province of Xieng Khouang, thousands of huge prehistoric stone jars have been found at about ninety sites, with between one and four hundred jars at each site. Each jar is up to 3 metres (10 ft) in height and about 1 metre (3 ft) in diameter.
When the jars were first investigated in the 1930s, they were thought to be connected to burial practices, as they were similar to other jars found in Indo-China that had definitely been used for that purpose, but no human or animal remains were ever found in or near the Laotian jars. A local belief is that the jars were used for brewing alcohol, but there is no evidence to support that idea. The jars also seem to be designed to be fitted with lids, and although such lids have been found nearby, no jar has been discovered with the lid in place. Even the age of the jars is unknown, though they are thought to date from the Iron Age, some time between 500 BC and AD 500.
19. What was the cause of death of Alexander the Great?
Alexander III of Macedon was undoubtedly among the most successful military commanders of all time. By the age of thirty, after a ten-year series of campaigns against the Persians and others, he had created one of the largest empires in history. But before his thirty-third birthday, he was dead.
All we know of his death, which occurred in Babylon in June 323 BC, is that it followed an intense fever, and that two days before he died, his soldiers marched past him in tribute as he waved silently. Later Greek and Roman historians, rather like a good many modern journalists, were disinclined to let the facts get in the way of a good story, and came up with a number of different scenarios to account for his death.
Plutarch mentions a fever, which he says developed a fortnight earlier after Alexander had dinner with one of his admirals and then indulged in a drinking session with a friend. Diodorus says he died in agony after drinking a large bowl of wine in honour of Hercules. Others suggest that he was poisoned by Antipater, one of his own generals, who had recently been dismissed as viceroy of Macedonia. Antipater’s son Iollas was Alexander’s wine-pourer, so would have had both the motive and the opportunity.
A less dramatic explanation is that Alexander died from a combination of heavy drinking and a series of wounds sustained in battle, while one more recent suggestion is that he was poisoned by excessive amounts of the hellebore in the medication he took for his injuries. Death by natural causes from diseases such as typhoid, malaria and West Nile fever are also possible. The latest theory, proposed in 2010, is that Alexander’s symptoms – which included not only fever, but also excruciating pains in his liver and his joints, and loss of the power of speech – were consistent with poisoning by calicheamicin, a highly toxic substance produced by certain soil bacteria. Calicheamicin is found in the River Mavronéri in the Peloponnese, a river that the ancient Greeks identified with the River Styx, the mythical entrance to the Underworld, whose waters were said to be deadly poisonous.
20. Were any of the crystal skulls in museums made in ancient times?
The release in 2008 of the film Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull renewed public interest in such skulls, examples of which are on display in some of the world’s most reputable museums. Said to have been produced by the long-lost Mesoamerican civilizations of the Aztecs or the Mayans, and believed by some to possess mystical properties, the skulls caught the imagination of the New Age movement in the 1960s – and this no doubt boosted the already flourishing trade in fake relics allegedly from pre-Columbian times, a trade that has gone on since at least the middle of the nineteenth century.
Attempts to date the crystal skull in the British Museum have been made at various times since 1950, and in 1996 a joint study of the BM skull and a similar one in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, revealed tool marks that must have been made by a jeweller’s wheel – a tool unknown to the Aztecs or Mayans, and which only appeared much later in Europe. The BM consequently reclassified their skull, which they had acquired in 1897, as ‘old’ rather than ‘ancient’.
Whether any of the skulls in other museums or in private hands are genuine antiquities remains an open question.
See alsoCANNIBALISM 68, CLEOPATRA 84–6, DRUIDS 139–40, EGYPTOLOGY 158–62, THE GREEKS 217–18, LANGUAGE 255–7, THE PYRAMIDS 396–8, ROME 412, THE SPHINX 440–44, UNICORNS 457, WRITING SYSTEMS 493–4, 496
ANTARCTICA
21. Who was the first person to set foot on Antarctica?
The ancient Greeks named the Arctic after arktos, the Greek word for ‘bear’, referring to the Great Bear constellation, Ursa Major, which is seen in the northern sky. With admirable logic, they called the other end of the globe Antarktike, because it was opposite (anti-) the Arctic. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of expeditions sailed south for the purpose of fishing or exploration, until the ice stopped them making further southward progress. It was only with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42, led by Charles Wilkes, that the existence of land beneath the ice was confirmed and Antarctica was shown to be a true continent.
The first person to set foot on that land after Wilkes had confirmed its existence may have been a member of the crew on an expedition led by the French explorer and sea captain Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville; this may have occurred on 20 January 1840. There is some evidence, however, that the American sealer John Davis may have set foot on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1821, but even he was not sure whether he landed on the continent itself or a nearby island, and the precise location of his landing was not properly recorded. There are similar doubts about the location of the 1840 landing by d’Urville’s expedition.
22. What creatures live in Lake Vostok in Antarctica?
Around 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) below the surface of the Antarctic ice lies Lake Vostok, the largest of the subglacial lakes of the southern continent. It has lain hidden for at least 14 million years and possibly twice as long. Its existence was not even suspected until 1967, and not confirmed until 1993. Not even a water sample has been extracted from it, but a Russian team has been drilling through the ice and almost reached the lake when the weather forced them to give up in February 2011. When the coldest season is over, however, drilling will resume and we may soon learn the nature of the life-forms that have grown in this vast but isolated lake, which measures 250 by 50 kilometres (150 by 30 miles). The results will be of particular interest to scientists looking for life elsewhere in the Solar System, as the conditions in Lake Vostok are thought to be similar to those found on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Quite apart from the possibility of the discovery of new lifeforms in Lake Vostok, there is another huge unanswered question about the lake.
23. What is the cause of the huge imbalance in the Earth’s magnetic field to the north of Lake Vostok in Antarctica?
Following the confirmation of the existence of Lake Vostok, a good deal of research on its size and nature was conducted by means of radar, either from the air or on the ground. These surveys revealed the unexpected existence of tidal currents and pockets of warm water, and these suggested both geothermal activity and more than one subterranean source for the waters of the lake. The most surprising discovery was made in 2003, when a large discrepancy was found in the Earth’s magnetic field over a considerable area of the lake. The difference between the measured value and the expected value is much greater than can be explained by normal daily variations of the field, and the discovery was seized upon by conspiracy theorists to support a wide range of increasingly bizarre ideas.
Some said the disparity was evidence of a secret city beneath the Antarctic ice. Could it be, the conspiracy theorists speculated, the lost city of Atlantis (→ ANCIENT HISTORY 8), or a US or Russian nuclear facility, or a crashed spacecraft – or even 2 million descendants of Nazis who had fled there after the Second World War?
The most likely explanation, however, is that the disparity is evidence of a thinning of the Earth’s crust beneath the waters of the lake caused by unexplained geological factors in the planet’s distant past. The project of drilling down to the lake’s surface has already taken more than fifteen years, and we may have to wait some time before finding out what is going on at the bottom of the lake, whether it is Atlantis, a Nazi colony, alien activity – or just an interesting piece of geology.
See alsoCARTOGRAPHY 71
See alsoPENGUINS 359
ANTHROPOLOGY
24. Is there any biological reality to the idea of different human races?
As our knowledge of genetics has grown, the concept of ‘race’ in human beings has become ever more difficult to define. Before we knew about evolution and genes, it seemed obvious that human beings belonged to various different races. You only had to look at them. As we learned about genes controlling different aspects of a person’s appearance, however, the idea of ‘race’ became ever more difficult to sustain as a biological reality rather than a social construct or a pseudo-scientific attempt to justify xenophobic prejudice. From the genetic point of view, physical differences such as skin colour or hair texture are very superficial.
Recently, there have been attempts to justify a scientific concept of race based on the idea of breeding communities that remain essentially isolated from other such communities and therefore may develop their own genetic strains over a large number of generations. Opponents of that idea, however, suggest that interbreeding has always taken place, and any idea of ‘pure’ races evolving would have been scuppered by the historical movements of populations.
25. Why do Native Americans have grooves on the backs of their teeth?
For more than a century, American dentists have commented on a curious feature found in those of Native American descent: their front teeth have grooves on their backs. Such a characteristic has also been identified in Siberians, which has been taken to support the theory that the early inhabitants of North America arrived during the last Ice Age from Asia across a land bridge to Alaska (→ AMERICA 2). It is still very much an open question how and when this tooth-ridge evolved and what evolutionary advantage it could possibly have conferred .
26. Why are West Indian men three times as likely as white Englishmen to contract prostate cancer?
Many recent studies have confirmed that the incidence of prostate cancer and the associated mortality rate among Afro-Caribbeans is significantly higher than in other groups. Some recent research has extended its scope to show that African-Americans and men in West African nations historically associated with the transatlantic slave trade also have high rates of prostate cancer, suggesting that there is a genetic predisposition to it among these groups. Other research – in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaica and elsewhere – has put the blame on diet or on pesticide use.
27. Did the Dogon people of Mali possess inexplicable astronomical knowledge?
From the 1930s until the 1950s, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule studied the Dogon people of Mali and in 1946 reported that they apparently possessed extraordinary astronomical knowledge, mostly relating to the star Sirius. According to Griuale, they knew it was part of a binary star system whose companion took 50 years to complete an orbit. Sirius, however, is extraordinarily faint, and its companion star is a white dwarf which is completely invisible to the human eye, and whose existence has only been confirmed by mathematical calculations of the orbit of Sirius. The Dogons also apparently knew about the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.
More recently, doubt has been cast on the Dogons’ astronomical knowledge, with another researcher suggesting that they are very vague about which star they are referring to. All the same, Griaule’s accounts remain perplexing.
If they really did know about Sirius, there are two theories, one considerably more probable than the other. The first suggests that the Dogon learnt about it from alien visitors, presumably from Sirius. The more likely explanation is that they gleaned the information from a team of astronomers who visited Mali in 1893 to see a solar eclipse.
28. What happened to the Khazars?
We have already mentioned the unexplained disappearance of numerous civilizations at the end of the Bronze Age (→ ANCIENT HISTORY 13). A more recent mystery concerns the fate of the Khazars. The Khazars were an agglomeration of various nomadic peoples, who, between the sixth and eleventh centuries AD, coalesced to create one of the largest states in Eurasia, extending across the steppes of southern Russia from the Aral Sea in the east to the Black Sea in the west, and south across the Caucasus to the borders of what are now Turkey and Iran. Towards the end of this period, the might of the Khazar empire was sapped by battles with Svyatoslav of Kiev, then with the Mongol hordes, and their power faded away. Yet over the next two centuries, reports of Khazarian communities and individuals showed that the people had survived, if not their empire.
Many of these reports were from Jewish sources, which is not surprising, as Khazar royalty and most of its aristocracy had converted to Judaism in the eighth century. As a result, various writers (notably Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe) have speculated that Jewish communities in both Russia and Poland may have descended from the Khazars. This theory has yet to be supported by genetic evidence (→ JUDAISM 253–4).
ARMADILLOS
29. Why do nine-banded armadillos suffer from leprosy?
It is often stated that the nine-banded armadillo is the only animal other than the human that can suffer from leprosy. That is not quite true, as mice and rhesus monkeys have also been infected with leprosy, but the armadillo is certainly the most useful experimental animal for leprosy research, as up to 5 per cent of wild armadillos are thought to suffer from the disease. They are thus not only a valuable source of the bacteria that cause the disease, but also useful subjects for testing possible drugs and vaccines. The question as to why humans and armadillos should have evolved to share a particular susceptibility to the disease may possibly be illuminated when the complete genome of the nine-banded armadillo is unravelled.
AUSTRALIA
30. When did human beings first reach Australia?
The history of Homo sapiens – modern humans – is generally believed to have begun in Africa around 200,000 years ago, before our species gradually spread across the rest of the world. We know that the ancestors of the modern Aborigines first reached Australia from Asia, but there is still a large discrepancy between various estimates as to when this happened. The earliest human remains in Australia are from a site at Lake Mungo, New South Wales, and have been dated to around 50,000 years ago. Caution has been expressed about this figure, however, as some say that the carbon-dating techniques used are unreliable beyond 40,000 years.
Rocks bearing Aboriginal art have been dated even earlier, to 60,000 years ago, but with equal caution, and claims of 70,000 years have been made for a discovery of Aboriginal tools. It has even been suggested that an increase in the extent of fires in Australia 120,000 years ago is evidence of human activity at that time.
An associated problem is the question of how the first Australians reached their destination. The usual explanation involves a land bridge from Asia to the prehistoric continent of Sahul, formed by what are now Australia and New Guinea. The existence of a land bridge, however, is difficult to reconcile with the lack of similarity between animal species in Australasia and Southeast Asia (the so-called Wallace Line, dividing the fauna of the two regions, cuts through the islands of the Indonesian archipelago). Furthermore, the date at which the land bridge disappeared may not tally with the time the first Australians arrived – so they may have arrived by sea.
31. What killed off the giant kangaroo in Australia?
The giant kangaroo, which was up to 3 metres (10 ft) tall and weighed around 200 kg (450 lb), became extinct around 45,000 years ago, which tallies quite well with theories regarding the date that humans first arrived on the continent (→ 30). A natural conclusion is that the animal was simply hunted to extinction. An alternative theory blames climate change, pointing out that many other large Australian species, including 2-tonne wombats and 5-metre (16 ft) land crocodiles, died out before humans are thought to have arrived on the scene. According to this theory, it was drought that killed off the giant kangaroo.
In 2009, however, an analysis of the teeth of giant kangaroos revealed traces of drought-resistant plants, which was taken by some to point the finger back at humanity, as the animal had evidently adapted to climate change.
32. Why does Australia have so many venomous animals?
It is said that seven of the world’s ten most venomous snakes are to be found in Australia. Fortunately, the snakes tend to avoid people and there has not been a death from snakebite in Australia for many years. On the other hand, box jellyfish, stonefish, and both funnel web and redback spiders do continue to kill people. All of which raises the question as to why so many species have evolved a deadly weapon against humans in a continent in which the human population has always been very sparse.
In the seas around Australia, the fatal attractions include the long tentacles of the box jellyfish whose powerful venom may cause excruciating pain and even death from cardiac arrest. The blue-ring octopus is another of the world’s most toxic sea creatures: although only the size of a golf ball, it delivers a venom that paralyses its victim, with no known antidote. Perhaps most painful of all, however, is the stonefish, which lurks at the bottom of reefs, disguised as a rock.
Back on land, apart from the snakes, Australia offers the funnel web and redback spiders, of which the latter are known to have developed an unpleasant habit of nesting under lavatory seats. Thanks to the development of anti-venoms, deaths from spider bites are now very rare, but that does not alter their level of toxicity.
Snakes in India or scorpions in Mexico may be responsible for far more human fatalities, but the wide variety of fauna with anti-human capabilities in Australia is remarkable.
BATS
33. What is it like to be a bat?
In 1974 the American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper with this question as its title, and his essay has since become one of the most widely cited papers in any discussion of consciousness. Nagel argues that mental activity cannot be explained in terms of a physical process without losing the subjective experience. There can never be an objective account of a conscious experience. Or, to put it another way, only a bat can know what it is like to be a bat.
BEES
34. Why have half the honeybee colonies in the USA and Europe collapsed since 2006?
In Europe, it is known as honey-bee-colony depopulation syndrome, while in America they call it colony collapse disorder. Whatever the name, the result is the same: previously thriving colonies of honeybees can suffer catastrophic collapse. Since 2006, Europe and the USA have lost around half of their honeybees, and nobody quite knows why. Mites, parasites, fungi, pesticides or viruses could be to blame; even GM crops have been accused, and recent research has identified a parasite and a fungus that appear to have been present in all collapsed colonies; but the precise cause is still unknown.
35. How do bumblebees manage to fly?
Until 1996, bumblebees posed a big problem to the science of aeronautics, The problem was raised at the University of Göttingen in Germany in the 1930s, when a calculation was made that showed that according to everything that was known at the time, there was no way a bumblebee’s wings, flapping at the rate they do, could possibly produce enough lift to enable the bumblebee to fly. Its body weight was simply too high to be kept airborne.
In 1996 researchers in Cambridge seemed to have found the solution. By building a model of a flying insect and analysing the forces acting on it, they discovered a previously unknown source of lift, created by vortices of air trapped around the creature’s body. For some years, this allowed bumblebees to buzz around in peace, in the knowledge that their flight was scientifically possible after all. In 2001, however, Michael Dickinson and James Birch of the University of California came up with a more detailed picture of air flow over an insect wing, and in so doing cast renewed doubt on the possibility of bumblebee flight. After creating a robotic fruit fly that was more sophisticated than the Cambridge bumblebee, they concluded that the vortices identified in the earlier work could not explain the mystery of bumblebee flight after all.
Ever more complex models of flying insects followed, but there is still a discrepancy between theory and practice, possibly due in part to a difficulty in accurately simulating the rotation of an insect’s wings during flight. A recent study compared the actual ability of bumblebees to lift weights with theoretical predictions of how much they could carry. While the latest models stated that a bumblebee should be able to lift its own body plus an additional 53 per cent of its own weight, the experiments showed that the weight-lifting abilities of bees are 18 per cent better than predicted. So there are clearly some aspects of a bee’s flying ability that we still do not properly understand.
36. Do bumblebees have personalities?
The question of whether animals have personalities has been intriguing a number of researchers in recent years, and a flurry of papers have reported that creatures such as spiders, squid, blue tits and social bees have all shown behaviour indicating that individuals possess something analogous to human personality. For the purpose of these experiments, ‘personality’ is equated with ‘individual-specific consistency in their behaviour across time and context’. In other words, if an animal shows an identifiably different behaviour to another of its species in response to a similar situation, and that difference is maintained over time, then the animal has a personality.
In 2010, researchers at London University reported the results of experiments to monitor the reactions of bumblebees when they encountered flowers of a colour they had not previously seen. Using artificial flowers with sucrose solutions at their centres, the researchers measured the time bees spent foraging at each flower. As is generally the case with animals encountering something new, they spent longer investigating the strangely coloured flowers, either out of interest (neophilia) or suspicion (neophobia), but the overall results fell short of confirming that bumblebees have personalities. In that respect, the experiments started well by showing that individual bees showed differing behaviours towards the new plants, but those differences were not exhibited consistently over an extended period: ‘We conclude that for the neophilia/neophobia paradigm used here, bumblebee foragers do not fulfil the criteria for animal personality in the common sense of the term. Instead their behavioural response to novelty appears to be plastic, varying on a day to day basis.’
More research is clearly needed.
