Takarkori, before R1b

Today, Nada Salam et al. brings "Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara -" [and Hyper Chad]. Which title goes on to its own conclusion.

From Takarkori in southwestern Libya, are - rather, in 5000 BC, were - two females. Salam posts their DNA, 60000 years before that: branched in a third group alongside us Out-Of-Africa. Meanwhile during the great Epipaleolithic ice-age backwash into Morocco and the Horn, they got some of our Neander genes. But not nearly as many. So, where and when did my R1b-cousins "V88" get here?

Takarkori was already firing ceramics and herding herds, although not the camel. Green Sahara was nice enough I can assume some relationship with sorghum as well. This was mediated by those postEuropeans from the north. Chad was, it seems, too hot for most of us.

As for Takarkori's main ancestors: a substantial branch supplied 40% of the ancestry to Taforalt in Morocco 13000 BC. The other 60% is "Natufian" that is, Levantine preSemitic. Elsewhither, Takarkorians visited Ghana.

All this is telling me these ladies of Takarkori were not Tuaregs nor any other sort of Berber, as might be found in Morocco's hills today. Women don't have Y chromosomes (as Kindergarten Cop teaches) so, we wouldn't see direct evidence here. But back then, a R1b daddy should have bourne some stark differences from such an anciently-divergent population, with him. So these two were not Cushites nor even, really, Chadites.

Ancestresses to Nilo-Saharan, best represented today by Nubians, would be my first guess.

Nuclear war scenarios

Various antiwar Influencers, not least Michael Cernovich, have been touting Ann(i)e Jacobsen. As one who lived through the red-giant phase of the Cold War, I got the feeling that somebody who knows what they are talking about should handle this one. Maybe Jacobsen knows what she's talking about, too.

First up: Reddit doesn't like her book. We also have Matthew Petti and (on that "hair trigger" meme) Peter Huessy. It looks as if Jacobsen, in fact, is less-versed on the topic than was... Stanley Kubrick. At least Jacobsen isn't telling us to abandon the space programme like some idiots.

I think one issue we have in the 2020s, or really in the 1980s, besides the same damn Ministry songs is the prospect of an efficient and small warhead. It would inflict about the fifteen metric-kilotons of a Hiroshima but without wasting so much munition. That is: it would be more-easily fireable and would also not spill so much fallout. We can assume this 2022 paper still holds up.

Limited nuclear war might become more of an invasion-repellent application than an intercontinental ballistic opportunity. Would we train ICBMs on Russia if it delivered 15 kT unto some Azov-Battalion base... in internationally-recognised Russian territory? I wonder.

More likely, it breaks the taboo. Extension to civil wars become possible; then, to border wars... like Pakistan/Taliban. As that happens, think: For All Time.

On the plus side, America could launch those Orions from Greenland; we're already polar-orbiting on chemicals.

Brain drain

Nature ran a poll: 3/4 of scientists are considering the exit-door from the US. Leave aside we got this from Doug Cunningham at UPI, un-elected propagandist; and from Glenn Reynolds, likewise. The poll is credible.

'Tis true that many science-appreciators have got to be "Scientists" because they threaded the political needle back when their universities were very Left. However. I do not know that we can say this of Peter "Warp Speed" Marks nor of Steve Sailer.

Trump I believed in cutting red tape from biology. But he was betrayed, as Sailer must admit. Trump II has chosen, in retaliation, that crank Robert Kennedy. MAGA today, also feeling betrayed, has sided with the crank. You cannot today support THE VAXX in a conservative comment-board without getting dogpiled by selfappointed demon hunters.

Meanwhile creationists, about the clearest example of antiscientific grifters as can possibly exist, are feeling their oats.

If I were any kind of biologist, to the point of a practicing MD, I too would feel unwelcome in Trump's America. Expect rationing and/or higher premiums; expect to import any useful cancer medication. In the face of the epidemics which Kennedy's FDA will give us.

The pets of the classical era

Cyprus has always kept cats, like the Near East has long had bronze. Lately, we've seen Questions about when real bronzes actually got to southeast Europe - the classical Greece and maybe Cyrenaica. We're hearing similar about the cat. Some claim that the Greeks preferred polecats, that is the semidomestic ferret. Aristotle, for one, knew of tamed mustelids; it is probably the ferret, useful for rabbit-riddance.

Herodotus knew the cat well-enough to describe feline sex-politics where the cat isn't fully domestic, accurately as far as I know (it matches how male lions treat, say, cheetah cubs). He saved that for his account of Bubastis in Egypt. Some conclude he didn't see many cats in Greece. More likely, he just didn't like 'em: cats shared the reputation of mustelids, that they attacked birds.

The claim "yes ferret no cat" somewhat fails to account for the appearance of cats (and maybe the domestic rooster) in Etruscan grave-frescoes. Certainly as chickens and other fowl were being kept in coops, those keepers didn't want cats anymore than mustelids. Look what a pest the mongoose has become in Barbados.

Anyway: Sardinian cats were introduced, from lybica of course, around the Iron Age. The same study has that other cats extant in Europe today, besides imports like Milo's beloved Bengal, came later and separately.

To me this looks like feral cats roamed cities in Iron Age Europe but were not much beloved there. They were treated more as pests than as friends. It may have been the Hellenistic Era, when Egypt was integrated with the Greek and (increasingly) Roman world, that increasingly-urban Europeans acquired interest in cats as companions. Which cats they imported, rather than simply grabbing cats off their own streets.

The strewn field

Loeb-bros arguing for an impact for the Younger Dryas can take solace in the evidence for earlier impacts. One such formed a Tektite Strewn Field all over southeast Asia and Australia (skipping New Guinea). One Kerry Sieh is most-associated with the theory, on account he thinks he's found the crater: a volcano ate it. Specifically, the Bolaven in greater Thailand now part of Laos.

Not everybody is amused by that line of argument. Jiří Mizera, especially, accepts - I think - that a mess o' tektites has littered the southeast Old World. He just doesn't like where Sieh has set it. Anyway now youtubers with a sideline in bad AI are talking about it. So it's probably time to take note(s).

The present consensus might be Carling et al.: on the MIS 20 large meteorite impact (c., 788 to 785 ka) or 786-783 kBC.

pQeheq

A couple days ago I mooted that the Berber languages of the western Egyptian oases were intrusive, from the great Imazighen west. I despaired of figuring what was spoken there before the Dorian invasion of the Cyrenaica - hence the questionmark on the title. Perhaps I should have posted that two years before I did. A little rooting-around pulled up Silvestri 2023.

The Hittites were known for incorporating foreign-language rituals and vocalising them into cuneiform. The Egyptians, it happens, did that too; there's a famous papyrus in demotic transliterating Canaanite hymns. What I didn't know is if the Egyptians ever bothered doing that favour for the tjehenu, excepting personal names like Osorkon and Sheshonq (when Libyans ruled as pharaohs). Says Silvestri - they did. One is in the "Qeheq" tongue, written in Merneptah's hieratic.

The DOI is 10.3917/edb.049.0319; but we can't read that UPDATE 3/29 here. So here is Silvestri's talk about it.

Preserving propellant

Propellants get expelled as plasma. Most of them are gas at room-temperature, or at least subject to sublimation at the pressures afforded in deep space. Maybe we could store, say, mercury as a solid in the shade beyond 1 AU; but we ain't using that in Earth orbit. Peeking in at Handmer's place, here's something on propellant boiloff.

This isn't for microcargoes, for which we're doing just fine with Hall thrusters. For longer missions I'd add that interplanetary journeys should be using fusion, which will lower the amount of propellant the ship needs to schlep. And once said ship gets to Deimos or some C-type near asteroid they'll be able to extract more propellant thence and just use that when needed. As we learn in Agile and JIT, inventory is waste.

All well and good: but we cannot get away from inventory in orbit, and anyway fusion propellant is mad pricey. We need a gas station, in short.