More like NOT-swana

No offence to the fine citizens of the Republic of Botswana, which is one of the nicer countries in the old Old World. But there's hype about humanity coming from that region sooo....

There's an interesting side-note in the Silver Siberian Fox's thread; that the bio-arxiv might be putting Nature (and peer-review generally) out of business, but... ehhh. The mathematicians are already there with the regular arxiv, I'm told. I do think there's a case for forcing authors to get editors. So bioRχiv shouldn't pop the champagne yet.

Anyway, although Europeans will preach at you that mtDNA is only half a population, that counts mainly for Europeans. We're the ones with the taboo against cousin-fracking. Outside Europe, tribes tend not to outmarry; they just move, and bring their women. So I'm not paying too much attention to the naysayers. Okay... maybe a little.

Business Insider, much as I have distrusted them in the past, offers the most cogent critique (or quotes the best, anyway), from Ryan Raaum at Lehman College. He points out that the study did not find the common ancestrix of Botswana "L0" and everyone else. They just found L0. So the ancestrix could have come from elsewhere, sent L0 across the Zambezi (where she stayed), and multiplied at home.

Also by that time there were already humans all over Africa and, indeed, in Eurasia. Not least, the so-called Ghost Populations, like the Neanders. So although the L-crew were the baddest bitches in Africa, such that no other mtDNA survives, they did subsume others. By the time they got to the northeast Horn of Africa, which is what I as a nonblack care about, they'd already absorbed a lot of these populations en route. This bubble-graph is pretty cool.

An aurora in Nuaym bin Hammad

A couple weeks back I found “The Earliest Candidates of Auroral Observations in Assyrian Astrological Reports: Insights on Solar Activity around 660 BCE”. Further, I found its draught on the arxiv for Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) and History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph). With all that, I have a new project: "Observations of an aurora in Islamic apocalyptic subsequent to the 774 CE carbon anomaly".

I usually post my work as part of the "zimriel project": Google Docs, linked on my site. But this one, I wanted to upload to the arxiv. I have created an account... but I find that the arxiv has special rules to keep the, er, dross out. To post in an area, I need an endorsement from someone else who is active on that area. The areas I want are, of course, the areas "astro-ph.SR" and "physics.hist-ph". Although I also considered "astro-ph.HE".

Until that happens (or, unless that happens...), feel free to read my work as a freely-available Google Doc, here.

How America defeated the Nazis

Ineffable Island: On 2 October, Takaaki K. Watanabe, Tsuyoshi Watanabe, Atsuko Yamazaki and Miriam Pfeiffer linked a Sahara sandstorm to 2100 BC Oman coral damage and then... "Oman corals suggest that a stronger winter shamal [wind] season caused the Akkadian Empire (Mesopotamia) collapse", Geology. doi 10.1130/G46604.1

Over the 1930s there was a dustbowl in North America, famously. The western edge of our Great Plains - where I live - is intermittently a Gobi, when you get out of the mountains. Nebraska is particularly surreal; in early summer you can see green mesas and even green dust-dunes. Back when irrigation was not yet finished, and Wall Street investment sank, on the first drought this area went full Sahara. The driest part was in the rockier Texas panhandle... but the affected area spread to the dustiest part north of that.

The early 1940s featured one of the worst winters ever to envelop Eastern Europe. The winter had a hand in stalling Stalin's takeover of Finland; and its early onset slowed Hitler's takeover of Russia.

If you look at a globe, the dust-prone parts of Parias I'm talking about cover, in "affected area", from 30-45 degrees latitude. The Wehrmacht had to reach Moskau, so had to range 50-55 degrees. The winds blow west-to-east, and more strongly the more north of 40 degrees.

Once Nebraska dust had entered the atmosphere, it took a few years to reach sufficient concentrations over eastern Europe to chill the place.

BACKDATING 10/26.

The end of the British Bronze Age

Over the ninth century BC, the presumed-Celtic people of the Thames brought their broken bronze implements to the river delta (*Londunum, I guess). Mostly these were weapons but also some jewelry. There the Londoners carefully arranged all the bronze. And then they quit doing that (h/t Saraceni).

I know of no population turnover in this region at this time. UPDATE 12/31/21: This coincides with a gene-flip along the Thames, although - this far southeast - this flip will have finished by the ninth century.

Population changes or no, this tells us bronze became (sharply) less valuable. For weapons, iron became a competitor locally; and I expect also that the Continent had lightened up on its demand for British tin. And since bronze was cheaper now the ladyfolk didn't see as much value in its jewelry, either.

Anyone still wanting some old-fashioned bronzework for, I dunno, a nice looking crock-pot could, now, go make a new one from new bronze. Those running the recycling centre simply quit their jobs. Probably as soon they noticed that they'd started getting jewelry now.

The frog model

Ineffable Island reports on "First Four Legged Creatures". Amphibians of course.

The report sketches out an "amphibian" that was perhaps a couple feet long and still, at base, a water creature. They poked their heads above water to spot prey on land. The land prey will be arthropod - the report cites millipedes. Given the upper jaw strength on the amphibian, the arthropodic prey will have had hard upper carapaces already (guarding against other bugs I guess).

One possibility which the report doesn't note yet: mating-calls. A tetrafin/-pod water-breather like Ichthyostega might have got the ability to lock down its breathing-apparatus, to move from pond A to pond B. The next stage will be to take in and expel air - for music, that the sound might carry across ponds. No point in pond B if there aren't any females there. But if pond C calls back - go for it.

The Cult of the Singing Flame - in press

I have wiped the bulk of "The Cult of the Singing Flame" from its present posting-ground. The good news: a much-improved version is set to be published: in The Averoigne Legacy, under Pickman's Press. Last I heard, the e-book is going out in the next week (for All Saints' Eve, when else) and a paperback soon after.

Some contributors had announced their notices earlier. And that's great! My situation, I feel, differs from most contributors', so I dared not say aught until now.

The publisher and I negotiated an agreement where I'd take a lower fee - for a few reasons: this is a small publisher, and the story demanded more editorial help than most on account of it being my first. In return I got the right to republish the story, which technically would include its pre-publication over there. But I am so pleased with the editorial help that, really, I don't want that original hanging out anywhere else. Also, based on the list of other authors, Simon Whitechapel in particular, I think this volume as a whole is going to be worth all of the time and money it requests of us.

FanFiction.net might delist the stub I left, for "advertising", which I hope they don't do, but if they do then I'll accept their decision.

REVIEW 11/10 - of the collection as a whole.

Death from the mountains

Vesuvius erupted in its usual horrendous fashion during the Early Bronze Age, around 1900 BC. This event delivered an “Avellino Pumice” layer throughout coastal and northeast Campania.

Per Claude Albore Livadie, Mark Pearce, Matteo Delle Donnede, and Natascia Pizzano, "The effects of the Avellino Pumice eruption on the population of the Early Bronze age Campanian plain (Southern Italy)": the eruption didn’t do all that much harm… at first. Livadie et al. note that the same people (well, people speaking the same language, anyway) resettled the region. For the most part.

Livadie et al. do note more tree pollen after the event. They think that the bulk of the resettlement aimed at such regions as weren’t so prone to forest – like hills. The motive the scholars ascribe is defence.

Another eruption, labeled “AP1”, was less intense but triggered more tree pollen. “AP2”, around 1700 BC, was weaker still; it didn’t even reach the coast. But AP2 coincided with the end of the Campanian farming culture, to be replaced by the “proto-Apennine” cattle culture (which I think is OscoUmbrian).

So what did the Campanians speak before all that? Although a farm culture they did use cattle (the Bronze Age tractor). Candidates I’d entertain include an Italic branch, a pre-Italic IndoEuropean outlier, some relative of Etruscan, a language-family now unknown, even a Berber offshoot. But I don’t think there is any way for us to know as yet.

The first Gauls in Italy

The Urnfield culture, after developing iron (and cremation), took over northern Italy as “proto-Villanova” but stalled out in Campania. Urnfield outside Italy is considered a Celtic culture; and in north Italy, Golasecca entered literacy speaking the “Lepontic” dialect of Gaulish.

I should add that Villanova culture proper, by the time it adopted literacy, spoke no Celtic (nor Italic) but only Etruscan. The Lepontics were strong enough to take Tuscany; not strong enough to remake Tuscany. It looks like the Mitanni over the Hurrians, or the Huns in Germany.

Further along the boot from Campania, when the Apennine hillfolk who didn’t take on Urnfield characteristics first make themselves read, they are writing in Oscan.

So I propose that “proto-Apennine” from 1700 BC on was already an Umbrian / Oscan / Samnite concern. Of interest is a change in ideography with no change in language - usually I like to say "pots aren't people but they are language". To that, ideograms don't always correlate to the spoken language as witness Linear A/B or, indeed, our own German switch from runes to Latin.

BACKDATING 10/22

DNA 9/26/21: Everything is verified.

Algeria's loss of faith

Modern Algeria is a nation which an Arab nationalist movement cobbled out of the three French "departments" in North Africa, and a great expanse of Tuareg-inhabited Sahara. The retreating French left a few die-hard Catholics in the region - monks, mainly. Recently Christianity has been spreading among the Arabs, this time "evangelical" and Arab-speaking. Algeria suppresses these. I owe the link to JihadWatch, but - as often over there - the situation is less simple than mere Islamic chauvinism.

In fact Islam is crumbling in Algeria, if not as quickly as it is crumbling in Tunisia and Libya.

There had never been an "Algerian nation"; just North African Arabs, and "Berber" groups like the Kabylie and the Tuareg. It is as if some alien conquerors had made a nation out of ... well, out of Spain or France; and then left.

When we were in Algeria, the local elite was officially secular, because they were the elite whom secular France had trained. But this elite felt contempt or fear for the Algerian commons. As a result they didn't offer much to the Algerian commons beyond slogans. This void was filled by those who believed, or pretended to believe, that God Himself had instructed them to look out for His believers.

A notion of shared history could possibly unite Algeria, as it had united France and (somewhat) unites central Mexico. But that takes many centuries which centuries Algeria has not yet shared. In North Africa, Islam provides that shared history, albeit a foreign one until 700 AD.

An election was held in 1991. Its first stage, toward local governments, went to Islamists. The military did a Turkey: it simply annuled those elections and canceled the next stage. Many Islamists, in turn, did a Syria (rather, the later Syrians would attempt an Algeria): a mass terror campaign. Only in North Africa, the Islamists had no foreign friends to keep the war alive. So the government won.

The nonIslamist Algerians today are more than just secular; they fear Islam. The average Muslim in Algeria, from direct memory of the terror or else from watching the news in Libya, is learning not to love Islam either. Maybe 10% of Algerians were "nonreligious" in 2013. That percentage is now a quarter. Tunisia is even further along, because their Islam (at least in the Tunis region) was always more cosmopolitan, allowing them a tourism industry, which terrorists have crippled. (Over the past decade Tunisia has allowed the Islamic al-Nahḍa "Ennahda" party into government; they've steadily been losing seats in their parliament, now at 52/217.)

If you're poor in North Africa and not a Muslim, you're on your own, at best. NonMuslims in North Africa are finding community in Christianity. Catholicism is tolerated in Algeria but they can't seek converts - I expect their congregations, these days, are mostly black immigrants from across the desert. North Africans who are Christian-curious have been seeking out the underground churches, which are in communication with evangelical post-Reform preachers.

Islamists see this as poaching, which it is. Their instinct, inherited from their 1990s forbears, is to react with violence. It worked against the French, right? The government has no choice but to act first, before the Islamists act.

Third Way leads to Third World

Third Way economic theories imply an antithesis between "Capitalism" and "Socialism", free-trade and central-command: such a Third Way promotes itself as their synthesis. In any event, any economic theory comes out of a refusal to judge the morality of a system. The only question which all theories ask is Deng's: "if the cat catches mice". These theories are a product of secularism, in short.

The most infamous Third Way is, of course, fascism. Mussolini's model, by that name or not, spread all over the world after the European powers lost their colonies. These colonies proclaimed themselves a "Third World", non-aligned to the two other worlds, in whatever order, under the banners of the Stars And Stripes and of the Hammer And Sickle. In a span of not-many years, the Third World became a wasteland.

Every now and again someone promotes a Third Way in a First World nation - sometimes, in a Second World nation, like Dubcek in Czechoslovakia 1968. The hope is for a system with rules and without cruelty. An example I've run across is the Georgism, which the educator Frank "Kek" McEachran promoted. Kek ended up inspiring full-on traitors serving Stalin. Distributism is another example, like that of Chesterton. Chesterton's protégé Arthur Bryant came close to embracing the Swastika - too close by his own estimation, to the extent he tried to recall his own book.

Third Way theories, I conclude, are weak. The theories are weak because we are weak; the theorist may be a dispassionate high-IQ analyst, but he is going to rely upon low-IQ grunts to enforce his theory. They just want to be given a purpose and told what to do. And what will make the most sense to them is a Leader. Which tends to fascism, either homegrown or run by a foreign Stalin.

Even getting to enacting worldviews like Georgism tend to be Jihad Complete Problems. People get into Georgism and Distributism - and Libertarianism - when they have given up on politics entire. The thing with Jihad though, is that it doesn't end with Muhammad's heaven on earth; it ends with Caliph al-Saffah.

Why farm?

With the hat-tip to Ineffable Island: the origins of farming are in private property.

Farming became a grand way to scale up a healthy and prosperous population. But - as Diamond famously noted - the farm was not so grand during the Neolithic nor into the Bronze Age - arguably even the Iron Age (until the Hellenistic era). Back in 5000 BC it was most nonobvious to the average farmer that they were doing any better than the local hunter-gatherers.

The article correctly points out that village tyrants weren't the reason for the enforcement of a farming way of life. Inequality hadn't kicked in yet. UPDATE 8/9/2020: In 4400 BC, the elites ate steak.

The article tracks closer to Rousseau. What the farm brought to a Neolithic populace, was stability. It brought to them private property; and not - pace stupid modern Leftists - alienable "capital". This was nothing more or less than the promise that, however mean your hovel and however difficult your land, it was still yours, and your posterity's.

It wasn't a life everyone wanted. It still isn't. Even in near-modern Parias / North America, multitudes of European (mostly Scots-Irish) settlers drifted into the hills to live like the Indians, sometimes with the Indians. But the settled life was a life that a family man and a family woman were willing to gamble on. Their kids might live longer and better. In the end, they proved to have gambled correctly.

New dawn in Assyria 660 BC

Last March I heard about a solar flare 660 BC, so I looked around for it. It’s too early for the Greeks and Maya, the Chinese didn’t notice (I checked Spring and Autumn), the Bible is silent, and Egypt was a mess. But Assyria (including lower Iraq, in those days) was going strong, and had inherited the Babylonian interest in astrology. So I hoped to find an aurora there. I, personally, didn't. But others have - in the tupsharrû / tupshar enûma anu enlil books.

On 12 September, Hisashi Hayakawa, Yasuyuki Mitsuma, Yusuke Ebihara, and Fusa Miyake posted “The Earliest Candidates of Auroral Observations in Assyrian Astrological Reports: Insights on Solar Activity around 660 BCE” to the arxiv... where I missed it. Thanks to ScienceDaily, I find this has now been accepted for publication.

Hayakawa’s crew calculate that magnetic north was closer to Assyria, and they agree that an aurora should have been visible down there. They have located three omen records of a “red sky” which might refer to such an event – those records are rare compared to, say, planetary conjunctions.

The bad news is that the three records went undated, except for the names of scribes whose careers we can track elsewhere. Assyria did have a consistent chronology; it’s just that the omen-tablets didn’t refer to it.

But we have a lot of good news: We now have the Semitic jargon for such events. We know 660 BC wasn’t a supernova, as Brakenridge elsewhere had suspected of 814 BC. And we can suspect that Lower Egypt, Syria, and northwest China all saw 660 BC as well.

It is a matter of time before other text is found or identified concerning this event. With direct chronological content.

Knighting Columbus

I didn’t quite get into Columbus himself yesterday, so much as into the Columbian Expedition(s). It’s time we discussed modern (white and Catholic) Columbus apologetic.

When modern apologists discuss Columbus, they implicitly depend on Carol Delaney especially Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (2012). Catholic World Report has the most-detailed and least-silly review I could yet find – mostly favourable.

This informs us that Delaney had built upon Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s biography of Columbus (1991). The WSJ, meanwhile, picked Fernandez to review Delaney. Fernandez was… not a fan of Delaney’s book. The review is paywalled but Josef Kuhn did a summary for Religion News Service.

Fernandez rejects the “clash of civilisations” as pertinent to Christianity and Islam - “a figment of contemporary imaginations”. Fine then; let us ask, in a 1492 AD context, if Columbus and the queen of Castile believed that “Christendom” and “Islam” – and Asia, and the Caribbean – amounted to different civilisations. The answer seems so obvious I have to ask what drugs Fernandez was taking when he wrote that.

Fernandez does point out that early 1500s Spanish literature tends to be self-serving, which Restall explains in detail concerning Columbus’ greatest successor as conquistador and governor, Hernan Cortés. Delaney will hopefully get a Restall of her own. Although, to be blunt, Fernandez isn’t him. Until Delaney gets a less-biased critic, her book must stand.

Where Delaney stands is on Bartolome de Las Casas, whose work is a better foundation than most. In it – so I gather – we learn that Columbus did engage in acts of rapine and slavery. Some of it was excused that he’d enslaved mostly cannibals and criminals, but then… his invasion, by exploding the old Carib economy, had rather created a few of these.

Columbus was appointed to the post of “Governor of the West Indies”, mostly in absentia as his main mission was exploration. The Third Voyage is the main event, here, starting 1498, which saw the man’s brothers doing the actual governing in Hispaniola. Columbus’ administration is best rated "chaotic". He intermittently permitted his Spanish underlings to do their worst, and then he punished them for the inevitable and bloody results. His (mis)rule culminated in an execution of two of the worst Spaniards there. That ensured that he had no friends on the island at all – dramatically illustrated in testimony rediscovered only in 2006.

So the Spanish Crown unseated the goofus within two years.

If you want a holiday for this man, be my guest, but don’t count on me to be joining in.

UPDATE 11/8: JewAmongYou agrees. I'm glad he's back! UPDATE 8/30/2020: Colavito on Italian Americana.

Columbus Day

The Waldseemüller Map was published in 1507 based on assumptions made up to then. The map was made possible, and necessary, because by then every European knew there was a new world out there. A book came out in 2015 proposing that some of the map’s assumptions came from hitherto-secret Portuguese lore, and that it was this very map which made it all public to the world for the first time.

Also read here, but take it with some salt.

I think we can all agree, the secret of some large landmasses to the northwest and south of the Canaries, by 1492, had become an open one in western Europe. Basques, Norse, and even some Brits (Cornish mainly) were fishing not far off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland: per Brian Fagan, Fish On Friday. The Portuguese government had failed with Dulmo; but I wonder if unofficial accounts had earlier traipsed eastern Brasil, thus inspiring d'Ulm's attempt. The fishermen didn’t want others to discover their secrets; and the Portuguese didn’t want their rivals grabbing colonies the Portuguese were hoping to take first.

So Columbus could already suspect a Brasil continent – soon to be dubbed “America” – and some smaller landmasses in the north, the largest of which was provisionally “Parias”. And do remember: Columbus wasn’t even asked to go find more such islands, nor even continents; and he did NOT so ask his patron the Queen. To her, he proposed some passage between the islands. Everyone knew the world was round but there remained some question to what degree it was a sphere, especially between the tropics. An hourglass earth with a passage between Parias and Brasil would suit Spain just fine. (In fact we now know that Earth is the opposite of an hourglass; we’re on an ellipsoid.)

As pointed out, the Spanish came to feel embarrassed by Columbus much as, later, they despised Cortés. Even in America, “Columbus Day” was an Italian festival. An excuse for Sicilian immigrants to celebrate a… Genovese.

Columbus Day would make sense for the West Indies, including southern Florida. It might also make sense for certain post-West-Indian outposts like the Carolinas. Unsure how much sense it makes for the most of the United States or Canada.

Giovanni Caboto is a better choice for an Italian who thought he’d ended up in Asia and almost, but didn’t, land between Maine and Georgia. Cabot didn’t land here, closer. And his theory that the natives were Siberian was a demonstrable improvement over Columbus’ rival theory. And pace Ed Driscoll and the "--- With Lid" blog - Chabotte didn't enslave anybody.

UPDATE 11/12/2020: Need to nuance Portugal in light of Dulmo.

Land-limitation and farming

Last month Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles ("BFB") put out "The farming-inequality nexus: new insights from ancient Western Eurasia", Antiquity (2019) doi 10.15184/aqy.2019.105. Alongside this, we may refer to the latest map of the spread of farming to new places.

BFB propose that when farmers learnt to domesticate oxen, land and oxen suddenly got very valuable... and human labour, cheaper. Farmers with oxen could produce food more cheaply than the old farmers hoeing by hand; "passing the savings on to you, the customer" as the saying goes. Any farmer who couldn't afford an ox was left to tend vegetable-plots, if that. This is a recipe for inequality based upon a labour-pool; or, as Marx would call the latter, the proletariat. BFB's measure for inequality is the "Gini Coefficient".

A symptom of a "land-limited" economy is the effort to clear more land or to recycle the old land. Learning to ferment manure into fertiliser was one step. Irrigation is another. So is clearing out forest. Or terracing hills against erosion.

The real inequality, says the text, started the fourth millennium BC onwards but the chart "figure 3" points to the four thousands BC. Catalhoyuk, Civilisation Of The Goddess^TM, was already unequal in the 6000s; Eridu down Iraq, in the late 4000s. Southern Europe wouldn't get that bad until the Minoan era. But over the 4000s, European towns did raise their Gini percentiles to varying degrees. UPDATE 8/9/2020: 4400 BC, Poland.

That map of the spread of farming shows that farming had already spread before these inequalities had kicked in. Also, the move was very slow. This doesn't look like a big push of land-hungry plantation-owners. It looks more like mere overpopulation by the freeholders, pushing their way up the rivers, likely under heavy fire by the old hunter-gathering woodwoses decidedly Not Dead Yet. By 5000ish BC, the farmers had finally taken northern Continental Europe. And there they stayed, not crossing the North Sea.

At 4000 BC, though, after a whole millennium of farmers dwelling along the French and German coasts, a sudden push conquered the Danes' Mark, Kent, and Anglesey.

I think that to feed this proletariat, Europeans had to learn very quickly to improve their fishing-boats for North Sea conditions. They also needed more land - after the plantation owners had done kicking the freeholders off their own land.

Ilana Mercer versus Heather mac Donald

The question of "the deserving poor" versus "the underclass" has a long pedigree. I think I first had this conversation with my grandfather; he explained How It Used To Be. In classical England the deserving poor got the workhouse, a.k.a. "the poorhouse"; maybe indenture. The insane got the asylum alias, "Bedlam". Criminals got Australia, or the rope. (What can I say. Product Of His Times.)

We see a similar tripartite division in Deep Space Nine's 1990s jeremiad against the "haven" - San Francisco's streets approximating our near future. In our times, nobody gets anything. They just get stuck on the streets or maybe in some fenced-off part of the streets, with Social Services. Which services then get cut, because who cares about street scum. Welcome to Joker World. Soooo much more enlightened than the Victorian days for which dear Granddad pined.

Ilana Mercer recently posted two articles concerning Seattle, admitting that under half the homeless were addicts, implying still that the (bare) majority were Deserving Poor. Mercer relied heavily upon the Official Record, publications like TIME magazine which have never lied to alt-righters like Mercer before. To test that hypothesis (whether or not she read it from Mercer) Heather mac Donald has gone to a homeless encampment in San Francisco to ... go ask them.

If there be Deserving Poor from San Fran among the homeless, most such have long since fled that particular city. The city is an open-air Bedlam now. The homeless are prey to a criminal element who have homes of their own, far from there. As in - Honduras far. I doubt matters differ so far in Seattle. Maybe Mercer could go ask them.

Dame Mac Donald is very brave to give us this article - which even admits to an illegal drug deal on her own part, to test the cost of fentanyl. She could be busted for that and probably will be; less for the act itself, than for making the city, the state, and the Federal deep state all look bad.

My instinct is that Mercer is right about the situation that is driving the wealthiest cities' downscale working-class out of house and home. But there is a great difference between "Pursuit Of Happyness" and the disaster that is developing in the streets. If a man is priced out of city A, the man can move to city B, earn up a little nest egg, and maybe move back. For Europeans, we've been doing that literally before we had a literature to record it.

This disaster isn't being driven by Big Tech. It is being driven by a failure of law enforcement.

Dino World

If it hadn't been for one specific disaster, the alt-world palaeontologists would likely still be separating the Mesozoic and Caenozoic ... but by the evolution of grasses. It was sheer luck - for dinos, misfortune - that, when grasses emerged, which had confused the natural order already, a disaster occurred that shifted the ecology (temporarily) heavily to these grasses - and to bugs, rodents, and small birds.

Absent Chicxulub, dinosaurian herbivores would have evolved digestive-systems to handle those tougher flora. I can easily imagine a feathered horse-analogue. The two-footed raptor family was already around and would have chased those horses. The whole saurian family had efficient respiratory systems and would own the mountains as surely as the eagle owns the sky.

We mammals already had the forest canopy; lemurs and monkeys would stay there. And with our stronger bones, some mammals could enter the rivers, fend off the crocodiles, and evolve into the hippopotamus.

One might wonder if the placenta was the killer app allowing longer gestation, against a dinosaurian's egg. But consider that we humans are effectively gestating our young for months or even years after birth. Our babies are quite helpless. Like baby birds.

It could be that on alien planets sentient velociraptors (mounted on pegasi?) are more common than are sentient mammals.

HERBIVORES 11/21/2020: The hadrosaurs and 'ceratopes were already adjusted to the new flora. Hadrosaurs just scooped up lilypads; the 'ceratopes had the guts for the grasses. Their carnivores by contrast seem less robust to changing conditions. So, the PETM ten million years later looks like the shock to push the latter off.

Gaps

When I was a kid, and now that my brothers have kids, we've glided over large stretches in our presentation of the Natural History. We lead up to the Permian and its Great Dying at the end. Then there's the Dinosaur Age, in the Mesozoic. But the Mesozoic and the Dinosaur Age are not coterminous; this "middle life" era starts with the Triassic, ending in its own horrendous extinction event. Only from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous do we get dinosaur rule. Another gap is within our Caenozoic. First is the Palaeocene, after the non-bird dinosaurians all died out 65ish million years ago; but then these mammalian lifeforms got overturned by the P/E Thermal Maximum 55 mya. Eocene life is recognisably ours.

A large what-if thought experiment is, what if the meteor didn't hit Chicxulub.

For some time dinosaurians and mammals would have continued running up against one another. But what happened 55 mya might still have happened. Or maybe that asteroid would have taken a few more swings around the sun and hit us later...

Did Chicxulub rattle the innards of the earth enough to change the motion of magma-plumes? Was the 55 mya event a knock-on from that?

Never surrender

There's an argument that the Right should hold our fire against antiscientific fraud-peddlers like Fred Reed. Some claim, he's on Our Side - elsewhere. Or even if he's not, such a one is less annoying and less damaging than the transnational Left with its own antiscientific frauds to peddle. Most of the people banned from LGF argued the former. John Derbyshire has lately been arguing the latter.

To that, I just want to point over to what the scientists are saying, caught up in The Replication Crisis. The way Science! (which we f£cking love!!) is supposed to work is that you come up with testable hypotheses and then test them.

Recently there's this guy Devang Mehta, who devoted four years of his life evaluating CRISPR. CRISPR was supposed to get us genetics that resist disease. Mehta found that those diseases evolve, to work around the newly added defences. Mehta moots a worry that he's given ammunition to damage the reputation of gene engineering. But Mehta didn't disprove the underlying theory. In fact he'd supported it. Evolution won again. Its just that this battle was won against humanity's efforts.

In Current Year, nobody wants to hear about negative tests. They don't even want to hear about positive tests that raise additional, if predictable, results. The corruption is mainly Left-driven, yes; the descent into "epigenetic" Lysenkoism (for one) proceeds apace. The Right should be less eager to join in on it.

I comment about scientific debates because - well, this blog is my space (one of them) and I've (clearly) never much cared about whom I've pleased or displeased on my own turf. Also I personally don't like to read dishonesty, for its own sake, and dishonesty needs to be called out. Even if I did think the Right is right, which I mostly do, I also think the Right should be able to prove its own case based on first principles. Which the Right can, much better than the Left can, which prefers being politically-correct over being demonstrably correct.

The Right doesn't, because it doesn't believe in itself. It follows the Left's playbook, thinking that playbook will work. It bites its tongue, to build that elusive coalition. It cucks out.

97%!

Let's talk about the bandwagon effect. The 97% of scientists who (supposedly) have signed onto the Current Year consensus about global warming.

To show my hand: by instinct, I am a revisionist, but not a denier.

Let's start with the basic three factors: warming, cooling, and what prevents either. There are factors which warm the planet - otherwise, we'd all be at the universe's blackbody temperature, near zero Kelvin. Mere entropy - the stark differential between the warmed earth and deep space - will cool this place. Also to be considered are factors that prevent the cooling here, summed up under the "greenhouse effect"; and that prevent the warming, mainly albedo (=light-reflection).

The major part of direct global warming (and snowmelt) comes from our sun. Some direct warming is vulcanism; also, from heat generated by fires, natural or not, and by urban environments. For heat retention and reflection we can look at cloud cover or algae or soot.

Many factors are indeed anthropogenic - even carbon-based. I would indeed support measures to reduce (especially) dark soot, blanketing the northern snows and the bright deserts. We need means to reduce methane, sulfur hexafluoride, and such, also. I was fine with our earlier push against chlorofluorocarbons.

I object mainly to our focus on carbon dioxide. It is plantfood. Plants will consume it. I don't think lowering our carbon "foot print" will do much, nor that I care if it would.

More and more papers are publishing positive results. And more and more researchers are happy to promote when negative results are "flawed". There's that "3%" again, which implies that 97%, bogus on its face. Who's paying for it? On the other side, what might happen if the results which proved the "3%", "flawed", are turned on the work of - say - that litigious Michael Mann?

Do I trust the people who sell us electricity, or do I trust the people who want me enslaved "for my protection"?

Planet of the pigs

There's talk humans have taught monkeys to bathe in Japanese hot springs and to wash food in the water before eating it. There's even talk we've brought monkeys and apes into the Stone Age. Now we hear of pigs using tools too.

And we've long heard the argument that the reason megafauna have lasted so much longer in Africa than out in Eurasia and the Americas, is that the African megafauna have evolved amongst modern humans and learnt to be stronger. In Eurasia they evolved (or didn't) amongst our more-retiring and stagnant Neander-spawn cousins. And in the Americas, whose highest native(ish) primate is the capuchin monkey, the fauna simply fell before the Clovis hunters and the Younger Dryas.

We are training our future rivals. Should another Dryas event bomb us back to the Palaeolithic; in the next Eemian / Holocene warm patch, our degenerate descendants might be wrestling near-sentient baboons and bears.

Biological episteme

Fred Reed wants to talk biology. In the process he calls out Razib Khan for booting him out the mailing-lists. It all reminds me of the great air-clearing I did a decade back concerning certain figures of "the counterjihad".

I read this piece a couple days ago but felt it would be too important just to dash off a response in the couple hours between sundown and bedtime.

Since maybe 2000 or so I have contracted an allergy to the Just Asking Questions genre including to any comment that ends "just sayin'". Often this line of argument is not done in good faith. The tone is passive-aggressive. Such an author has his answers already. You could argue for your side (as if your whole body of work wasn't already doing that) but you're not convincing him. He'll just be back in a few weeks to Jusk Ask the same Questions. The aim isn't to debate the site's hosts, but to hit the peanut gallery - on the occasion the hosts (being human) say the wrong thing, are out looking at a telescope, or are just watching Big Bang Theory or whatever. And to top it off these duplicitous liars present themselves as honest men cowering in fear as they plead before the powerful lords... "but I'm just saayyyin!!"

Another rhetorical technique is the farrago. There is never just the one question. Such an article will contain multitudes; Reed, here, raises six. Relevant or not, already answered or not, he who would answer one of them is obliged to answer all of them. This takes time. And the time spent chasing rabbits is time not spent on more productive pursuits. Especially if the rabbits are gaily hopping about in some wholly different pasture, like (most egregiously) question #4 here. That's on abiogenesis. This precedes biology by definition. This therefore lies as far outside our scope as the multiverse lies outside our universe's spacetime.

The most despicable of such rhetorical ploys is that sly ad-hominem, that personal attack from the shadows: Alinskyism. The author doesn't argue against Crick, Watson, and Mandel; he doesn't even argue against Khan. He argues against a strawman, inextricable from the earliest discoveries, whose name has been attached to more odious movements elsewhere. I suppose an antiHindu ideologue could be found to rant against the swastika and "Aryanism". In the biological debates the devil is "Darwin". Sometimes "Huxley", "Galton", and "eugenics". Personalise the target, isolate him...

Given all that, Fred Reed pretends not to understand why his Questions (which are, characteristically, repeated, despite his promises) had wearied his hosts. Reed has been silly on other issues, like on extralegal migration. So I am not all that concerned with arguing with Reed himself. I can however wrestle with this one essay.

There's a serious point buried in Reed's latest apologia. Start with the assumption that some serious basic questions remain in your science. How do we know the difference between a mop-up operation and a need to rethink the entire science? Before you answer too quickly, I recommend reading a bit about category theory in mathematics. Sometimes we do have to rethink it all. We pick a model first, then see how it stands up.

For biology we do own a model: the modern biological synthesis of Darwin, Galton, and genetics. We ignore abiogenesis (=Reed#4) so as to work with biology as it has evolved from Life Form Alpha, whatever that is or was. For the intelligent-design debate, which is philosophical, we can propose a meta-model, of how debates are conducted in those other nonmathematical sciences. Take physics. We can discuss a model that (so far) works, against a model that has failed.

I propose the search for the Higgs Boson as such an example; its general context being the Standard Model. Once electroweak theory was proposed, which required a field to generate the required masses for other bosons, we just needed to find those other bosons. For electroweak this was done in 1983. After 1983 we didn't need to find the Higgs itself. We kept at it anyway and found other particles on the way, like the Top Quark. As the experiments kept validating the Model, it was getting more and more likely that we'd find little more than "vanilla Higgs". Against that, there was the model of Newtonian motion and gravity, which Einstein a century ago overturned.

But note what happened in either case. The physicists did not fall back into some mediaeval Islamic dismissal, "G-d wills it". They took the uncharted parts of the Standard Model as a challenge to go look. Same with planet Mercury's non-Newtonian motion and gravity.

Amongst Fred Reed's actual-biological questions is #2, on homosexuality. I'd like to Pounce On and Seize this, as an illustration of how even when Reed tries science, he fails at it. The Modern World would like us just to accept this condition; for our adolescent children, to join it, under the tutelage of much older men, like Shepard Smith. Fred Reed would rule out heredity. Greg Cochran has proposed a disease. Fred Reed then asks, where's the virus. Those of us looking in from the outside, serious about the science, would like to find whatever causal agent there be. Sometimes disease-agents are bacterial; sometimes even fungal. Homosexuality might be a crack in the mind more than in the brain.

For our purposes here, though, we don't care. We just know that we've been learning a lot about the associations surrounding this abnormality. We would not have made this progress if - like Reed - we'd spent our time sniping at the researchers and muttering Deus Lo Volt to ourselves.

I could go on to address Reed's other questions, like #5 on the kidney's nerves and other deleterious biological factors - which one can explain, with Elaine Morgan, as Scars Of Evolution. But I won't, because we've already done down two of his six bleatings here, and it's all boring, and has already been answered, despite Reed's asinine efforts not to hear the answers. He'll be back with the same bad examples in a fortnight or in a month. He's done it for years and there's no stopping him.

When I conceived writing this response two nights back, I was willing to give Fred Reed the benefit of the doubt, that he honestly wanted some answers. Then, I wondered if he was just trolling. But now I understand his type. Fred Reed is a Gamma Male - the hero in his own story.

All the rest of us can do is not to enable him, and to work hard not to be like him. And, with Razib, to keep him out of our comments.

And PS: Darwin was right. About multicellular lifeforms anyway. At a lower level of life, about united coalitions.

The Volkisch and their thralls

Remember I was talking about how the Battle Axe culture was northern Corded Ware where they couldn't annex or remove the local farmers, fishers, and hunters...? Here's a study of the Bell Beaker culture, to Corded Ware's south up in Bavaria and Sudetenland.

I would like to credit Eurogenes. He'd dug up the raw data:

Genotype data from an upcoming Science paper titled Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe was uploaded recently to the Max Planck Society's Edmond database (see here). Among other things, the paper is going to focus on the genetic shifts in Germany's Lech Valley from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age.

Unfortunately Davidski yanked that post. So my post here is having to credit Saraceni again. DOI is 10.1126/science.aax6219.

Those Lech rivermen were farmers south of Augsburg, 2700ish BC to the 1200s BC; solidly Bronze Age although they're claiming the earliest stage as "Neolithic" (I would read, Arsenochalcic). The earliest Lech male DNA is, I have to assume based on us Bell Beakers over in Britain, heavily R1b-L21. At least, amongst the aristocracy - more exactly, amongst the timocracy.

Lech's timocracy oversaw a Vaisya caste - Old Europe farmer. Perhaps these were the proletariat left over after the IndoEuropean elite knocked out the previous lords. The new lords, sharing little in common with their newly-acquired underlings, turned up their noses at them. For wives, they went instead to the Únětice culture in Sudetenland. Inevitably over centuries some of the lords and homegrown helots mixed it up, but the Lech ruling men remained Beaker by Y chromosome.

The territory is, I think, associated with the Volcae of antiquity; ancestors to the Celts and the Italians.

The social dynamics might even explain some difference between Celt-Italic and the German language-families: the former immediately reduced the old European farmers to serfdom, where the latter had to live next to the farmers and hunter-gatherers for millennia. Celt-Italic, as a result, has few loanwords and its grammar is classically Indo-European. The German languages - which come from Denmark - have a heavy non Indo European substrate; and it has (alongside the Church) given rise to an exotic "Standard Average European" clustered in Lotharingia.

UPDATE 10/12 - the Beaker Blogger is on the case. UPDATE 9 PM MST: Eurogenes repost.

East and West, always different

I mentioned earlier a small ice age that hit the Neolithic villages of Europe 6400-6200 BC. I noticed that the end of the age coincided with Caucasian "hunter gatherers" turned into fishermen, roaming up the Russian rivers.

In that light, Saraceni links to a relevant article, which we missed last month: common carp aquaculture in Neolithic China dating back 8,000 years That's 6200-5700 BC. "China" wasn't the word those people in what we're calling Henan would have used of course; I don't think even "Xia" was yet uttered.

I'm guessing that in those winters, the hunter gathers ran out of game to hunt. Instead they learnt to fish. When the climate rebounded, the populations increased... and fished out their rivers. Same problem at the same time, in different places. Affecting different nations.

Those who became IndoEuropeans solved this by moving elsewhere; those of Henan solved it by public works. Since the latter stayed put, I conclude they already spoke what became Shang Chinese. Those lessons could be re-applied when their legendary Floods came, millennia later.

The first German colony

Here's DNA from the Battle Axe culture, in Scandinavia. It's a grave from 2500 BC but the culture dates back to 3000. The DNA is Ukraine - aka Yamnaya, aka IndoEuropean.

I'm intrigued that they just go ahead and call it Battle Axe Culture despite being aware of "Corded Ware". They don't seem to think that "Corded Ware" is a politicially-correct(?) euphemism. They consider Battle Axe to be the Scandinavian flavour of Corded Ware.

They also mention that the hunter-gatherers and the farmers are still loose in Scandinavia at the time. (They don't mention Finns at all... because those came later.) These groups "did not mix a lot", says co-author Mattias Jakobsson. I take it that battle axes could go only so far.

A review upon an Austrian painter

I have jumped ahead from reading AJP Taylor, and am looking abroad for other accounts of (Nazi) German perhaps-pre-emptive strikes and occupations. One such would be the lightning occupation of Denmark and the rather slower war in Norway.

The general impression I get from Taylor is that post-Bismarck Germany's interest was in regional hegemony; not in direct command. Germany might be German (there are recent genetic studies qualifying that) but the rest of central Europe assuredly is not. That is why Bismarck did not dismantle Austria when he defeated the Habsburgs' army, although he eminently could have. Bismarck wanted Austria intact as a German-run concern over those non-Germans further southeast. It is Taylor's thesis that Hitler's policy to Austria's southeast was similar; except that he had to play the Habsburg himself.

But... events, dear boy; events. More: Hitler was half the statesman Bismarck was. Taylor points out that Der Führer did pretty well with the hands dealt him; but the times demanded a Bismarck (or a Streseman), and... well, in the 1930s, the German race had only a Schiklgruber. Taylor asserts time and again that Hitler's first instinct was to wait out his opponents, until they appeased him. In between, Taylor lets slip that Hitler's second instinct was to make threats. When you do threats, you gotta be prepared to act on those threats should matters go elsewise.

Austria was wavering to sign on as a German satellite. Hitler just sent in the army and annexed the place. The Sudetens wavered on whether or not to join. Hitler bullied the Brits into forcing Benes of Czechoslovakia to sign them over; thus making that political-class look weak in front of their own voters. Slovakia declared independence and Hungary threatened to take them over. Hitler just plain invaded the Czech part before the Czech part could start a war it was certain to lose.

Even the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 was unnecessary.

Anyhoo, back to my original paragraph: thanks to a commenter at Unz, I got into the CODOH rabbithole. John Wear - like Taylor, and like Bryant, and like me I guess - feels a duty to side with The Bad Guys as far as he can. In this article, Wear is discussing Norway (and Denmark). It seems that Churchill had sent some d00dz over to Norway to occupy the place For Democracy. Hitler then counter-occupied Denmark en route to ousting said d00dz from Norway. A war of about six weeks ensued. Churchill lost. So far, so good... if we're ignoring the Norse. Which some might be tempted to do: Moldbug once acidly noted how the Norse didn't fight hard on either side. At first.

Wear can't ignore the Norse, to his credit. By the end of the Norse war, one Vidkun Quisling had done coup'ed the useless bystanding état. Hitler recognised that government because... well, who else was there.

Quisling, it turned out, did not enjoy the same support in Norway that - say - Pétain and Laval would enjoy in Vichy. More to the point: Quisling did nothing to earn such support. This particular puppet ruled as a tyrant and bled the nation dry on Hitler's behalf.

Hitler wasn't one to stop his underlings when they were being murderous tyrants. Perhaps he should have been such a one. But then I suppose he wouldn't have been Hitler. Even the "revisionists" seem to be making the Allies' case for them.

Pauline authorship

I figured I'd look around at what the nerds are saying about Paul's epistles these days. A Swiss guy Jacques Savoy has one: "Authorship of Pauline Epistles Revisited" (pdf). He's using statistics. In his case, Burrows’ Delta and Labbé’s intertextual distance.

For my part, I distrust "stylometric" statistics when looking into Holy Scriptures. That's because the urge to forge is high. About a decade back, Behnam Sadeghi made such an effort with the Quran. He found that most suwar look like they all came from the same author. The notion that the later suwar might have aped earlier ones, with precisely the intent to prove that God wrote the later ones like He did the earlier ones... that didn't seem to occur to the man. It also didn't occur to the man that poetry, relying upon stock phrases as it does, even saj', is particularly easy to forge in this manner.

As far as Savoy goes, he's working with prose. You don't do stock phrases there. Savoy's method offered more promise here than it would on the Quran.

Savoy ended up with a cluster of 1-2 Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians. Romans and Galatians can be expected to cluster given that Romans is pretty much Galatians' sequel. It is nice that he'd caught those other two in his net as well. Peripherally, he could hook Philippians with Galatians alone, 1 Thessalonians with 2 Corinthians alone, and 2 Thessalonians with the First. Colossians and "Ephesians" (="Laodicians", for Marcion) sit in their own cluster; same with the Pastorals. Philemon is a "singleton".

Mostly this agrees with the consensus of Paul scholars.

Philippians has the added wrinkle that it's a commentary upon a hymn. I think only the commentary is deemed Pauline. Perhaps Paul did that as a one-off and didn't expect the letter to get copied. Colossians meanwhile claims itself as a dual composition by Paul and Timothy; perhaps it actually is, and then Timothy wrote the whole of "Ephesians" by himself.

2 Thessalonians is considered someone else's rework of 1 Thessalonians; the Colossians-"Ephesians" group, although steeped in the other Paul letters including 1 Thess, don't bother with 2 Thess. Hebrews doesn't either.

I think that this is where Savoy's method runs into trouble. It can't tell certain fan-fiction based on Paul, like 2 Thess; from genuine(?) Paul doing a one-off, like Philippians.

UPDATE 11/17: I hear that a sober look at stylophrenology came out last April. Hythem Sidky.

Late Templar Hebrew

Hebrew students - and many Northwest Semitists generally - start with the Bible. Such students soon learn of dialects within the Bible; upon which, they are told that these fall into diachronic sequence. That is: there's a pre-exilic "Classical Biblical Hebrew", and a "Late Biblical Hebrew". The "Late" dialect permeates Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Hebrew parts of Ezra - which are known to be closely allied; and also Daniel 1, Daniel 8-12, and Esther. (The rest of Daniel and Ezra are Imperial Aramaic, famously.)

Following all Biblical variants of Hebrew, we have evidence for the language's survival in at least two spoken dialects. Uri Mor argued for a Qumran dialect as of the 100s BC. Aaron Koller further proposed a Shephelah dialect, perhaps after absorption of early Palestinian Aramaic; this became Mishnaic. Although these dialects evolved from Classical Biblical Hebrew and sometimes even preserved traits from the spoken language of Samaria.

In 2013, Ian Young - who had agreed with the CBH>LBH consensus - publicly altered his opinion. He confirmed the "Late" use of Hebrew in this cluster of books and book-sections. However he did not find such density of "Late" features in Habakkuk, Joel, or Zechariah, all self-declared as postexilic. He also didn't find this density in "Second Isaiah" 44-46. I have to wonder about certain of the Psalms as well.

Young instead finds "Late" features in (supposedly) earlier books - and in inscriptions at Arad, 600 BC. Where he confirms the Isaiah Scroll sometimes moving toward the "Late" features... he finds the movement sporadic, and sometimes (if more rarely) in the opposite direction.

"Late" Hebrew, then, isn't late. It is just idiosyncratic (in Young's term, "Peripheral"). Maybe not even that. What's idiosyncratic is Chronicles and its allied texts affecting this style. And then Daniel and Esther picking up on it, but those texts are known to be weird. UPDATE 11/28/22: Here's how weird is Esther. To be called out as absent from this calculus is Qohelet "Ecclesiates".

What I am seeing is a continuum of Hebrew before Exile; and, after Exile, a scribal jargon. A post-exilic school was able to force this "orthography" upon the books its members composed themselves, and upon allies in Diaspora. The school could not force its language upon the wider canon - which, we all agree, was composed outside, in time or in space or both.

I think it's the Jerusalem faction clustered at the Second Temple. Other scribes remained at work, copying the other Hebrew books.

Orthodox corruption of Scripture

I beg pardon of my Christian readers for the Ehrman-ism in the title, but I just read a recent interview (conversation, technically) with The Saker. It touches on this topic and points to his 2014 blog.

The Saker, by his own account, was pretty much raised as a Greek Orthodox patristics student. (He follows a Russian denomination, but his key Fathers are Greek.) On the one hand he admits his comments are his own opinion; on the other, he constantly refers to the Orthodox Fathers. I get the distinct sense that The Saker, when he discusses the Tahrif of the Bible, is speaking for a majority of his generation of Orthodox seminarians.

The Saker agrees that there was corruption in the Scriptures... the Western Scriptures. We in the West - and one must add, among the Syrians - have attempted a "return to sources", back to the Hebrew Scriptures. But by then the Hebrew Massoretes had already redacted their own text, hard. As of 800ish AD, an alternate Bible was to be had among the Greeks, the Copts, the Armenians possibly and the Old Sclovenes. This came from a Greek version now nicknamed "The Septuagint", LXX to give it its Latin numeral, in reference to some 72 elders, who by legend did the work under the Ptolemies in Egypt.

That's a birds-eye view of the consensus. And it's correct, as far as it goes - although we can question where the LXX was and where it wasn't a better Bible (I've been supporting its Jeremiah for decades; I am less keen on certain of its Psalms). Where I'm going to call out The Saker, is where he goes on to assert that the Hebrew Massoretes were inspired by a reaction against Christianity. That is a slander.

The Saker, patristics student, traces the claim to Justin the Martyr; an ancient Christian saint writing not long after the Synoptic Gospels, which he quoted through a harmony. For an Old Testament, modern scholars accept that Justin had access to an early Masoretic-tending text in Greek, that of Theodotion. Also extant in his days was a straight translation of the Masoretic, that of Aquila. Theodotion's LXX / MT hybrid might be what The Saker means by the claim (which he rejects) an attempt to corrupt the LXX was also made by Jews. I'd hazard a reason for Trypho's use of Theodotion: this one needs a common Scriptural ground with the Jews before it can debate them intelligently.

It happens that the proto-MT - at least, for Jeremiah (4QJer^a and ^c) and especially for Genesis and for Isaiah(!) - was already loose in Palestine before the abandonment of Qumran and, Ian Young argues plausibly, before Christ. These texts are preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Already by 73 AD, the Masada Zealots' only Bible was MT. The Zealots had no knowledge of Christ; and Josephus, also following MT, knew (famously) little or none.

As for why an MT was done which differs from the other texts at Qumran, and from the LXX: it doesn't matter, for the purpose of this post. (The Bible had taken on several revisions already; any one of these had its own reason to exist in its own time.) What matters is that Christianity didn't matter, yet, at the time the MT was fixed. Justin writing well over seventy years later was mistaken on the MT's motive, and the Jews of his day knew it.

To be fair to Justin, it was difficult for Jews in those days to argue that the MT edition preceded Christ; it is difficult enough for Ian Young in our days. Trypho and contemporaries were already compromised by the fact of the MT. An impartial referee like the Samaritans, if consulted, would just laugh at both sides, scoffing something von den Jüden und iren Lügen; saying with me that, for their own purpose, they didn't care when or why all the other Bibles were all different from the Samaritans' own. But in these days of scientific (even scientodic) analysis, we know better. Pity that The Saker doesn't.

There needs to be an overhaul in how this topic is discussed in Orthodoxy. I don't think The Saker's thesis would fly among the Catholics.

UPDATE 4/17/2020: Rethink Justin (and 2 Clement) on their experience of "Scripture". When Justin was confronting Jews, he might be loose on the NT; but this post deals with the OT.

Innocents abroad

ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν Χαναναῖοι, οὓς ἐδίωξεν Ἰησοῦς ὁ λῃστής

Thus, according to the Suda, read an inscription in Numidia (=Africa, west of Carthage) as translated into Greek. Procopius of Caesarea related similar, pinpointing its site to a double-stele near our Tangier; there, the Canaanim had "fled before Joshua's face". (h/t Linh Dinh himself citing "Twain" Clemens.) Movses of Khorene is also sometimes noted.

It would be easy to claim this as a forgery; W Bacher did just that in 1891, and so has Amitay in 2011. Amitay is assuredly correct that nobody knew or cared about Joshua/Jesus ben Nun until and unless they were in intimate contact with the Jewish Bible and, later, with the Christian Old Testament. Amitay is also right not to take Movses seriously, although he is more polite than I would be. And Procopius parallels Hippolytus, as the Suda and Movses parallel a fragment of John Antiochene. Of course Hippolytus had spoken no word of an inscription.

I would add, that version of "Manetho" with which, in the 80s AD, Josephus was in dialogue comprised, in part, a satire on the Exodus. It seems inevitable that someone might do the same with the Book of Joshua.

In any version, I would rule out Caesarea. The local Samaritans believed themselves Israelite and had no real problem with Joshua, although they didn't adopt that particular book for their canon.

Bacher thinks Procopius or his predecessors in Caesarea made it all up; Amitay blames a "Mandela Sign Language Guy" in Africa catering to Procopius' heroic and semiChristian tastes. Procopius certainly had an ear for scandal, as is rife in his Anecdota. Bacher sees this passage as a reaction to Josephus, who had denied that his race was λῃστής. Amitay points to the Moorish revolt of the 500s AD, the quelling of which revolt brought Procopius hither.

I will throw a bone to Amitay here: these words would indeed distance the Punic people from that newer, Christian Ἰησοῦς. More to the point "fled before the face" concedes the Divine khwarrah to Joshua. It reads to me as something a Bible-steeped victor would say - like Hippolytus, and in the 500s AD like Procopius; not like something the Punics would say of themselves.

Still, I propose that the translator was more honest than Amitay allows.

In the early 100s AD, after Josephus had published his work, his coethnics in the Diaspora rebelled across the African coast. But there, too, survived non Jewish descendants of Carthage and of other "Punics".

So, a context: I can imagine bilingual steles erected after Rome had quelled THAT revolt; alluding to Josephus in Greek, and translated to Punic - perhaps in Latin letters. These would assert the non-Jewish identity of the surviving Punic populace against this latest Jewish threat. These would also serve the Punics against pagan Roman suspicions, when that newer Ἰησοῦς attracted Roman attention. Later readers could impute what additional context they might impute.

Tin

My ancestors (those wot ain't Jewish or Asian) are mostly Celts, one way or another. Even the "Saxons" and "Normans" in my family tree were highly Celt by the time they took ship. The first of us arrived in the British Isles with "bell beaker" pottery. That would be 2500 BC. This is considered "Bronze Age".

There are lots of ways to make "bronze". "Bronze" just means "copper alloy". When such alloys were first mooted they were copper and ... arsenic. Later they switched to alloying with less-toxic tin. By the mid 2000s BC surely.

Tin isn't so easy to get, as is arsenic. The Bronze Age warriors had to search to the ends of the Earth for it. It happens that, historically, tin was rich in that peninsula we're now calling "Cornwall".

One drive which encouraged the first Celts to invade and to conquer Britain must have been the tin deposits in, exactly, its West Country.

Domination's the name of the game

Let's play a little game, you see, a game with some added reality: the "DiSC Assessment". It has to do with personality types. Back when I was at Shell, the "Myers Briggs" was all the rage; I didn't get to do this myself, but I was curious about it. These days I am more suspicious of management-endorsed psychology.

DiSC stands for "Dominance, influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness". These traits remind me of the virtues worshipped in the magical Britannia world of the Ultima series. The stench of cult is wafting to my nose.

Psychological tests which buttonhole humans into Types cannot but lead to prejudice. We cannot discriminate against someone based on orientation (whether or not we should) but there's no civil-rights case against those duly discovered to have Authoritarian Personality. And anyway: the tests're all certainly bogus.

There is a Replication Crisis raging throughout the sciences, even in mathematics. The crisis is much, much worse in psychology. Many of those who get into psychology are more fit to be analysed themselves than on theorising how to analyse others. Freud was particularly bad.

Given I've just critiqued such tests for facilitating ad hominem, it's only fair I look into the inventor of DiSC... William Marston. If his name sounds familiar, you might be a comic fan like me - he invented Wonder Woman. There's a movie about this man. He was a polygamous weirdo.

DiSC was composed by a weirdo, is based on some VERY dubious pre-WW2 psychology, and leads to prejudice. Small wonder some Christians consider it heresy.

BACKDATING 10/4, based on research during work hours. They want me to take this test in work hours; they need to accept that I am going to be reading up on it during work hours.

Etruscan visual literature

Varro mentions one Volnius as qui tragoedas Tuscas scripsit. The name "Volnius" sounds Etruscan (or Rasnal, as they'd call themselves). "Tragoeda" is of course the Greek tragedy genre. Varro's Roman contemporary Livy remembered that the main Etruscan art form as of 364 BC was what we might call a ballet. The Romans believed that they had got their drama straight from the Greeks, Livius Andronicus of Tarentum being the first.

Volnius to me seems like Lucius Accius: a native son who reworked Greek themes for his own people. As for what Volnius might have composed, we don't have that... but we might have witnesses to that. Or if not to Volnius, then to the ballet. The Etruscans were fond of relating mythological themes of the Greeks in their artwork. If their commons couldn't read Greek, they could watch it in the theatre.

The sorts of legend that appealed to the Tuscans were the violent sort. That Etruscans enjoyed watching bloodshed, even real, is well-known. Their very word for sand "hasna" ended up as the Roman gladiatorial arena.

Particularly recurrent in Tuscan tombs and urns is the tableau Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Iphigenia. Nowadays this tableau is associated with Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis. The Etruscans, however, give to Clytemnestra more agency: she attempts to rescue their daughter, and two guards restrain her. Such paintings do not translate the play.

Either through the ballet or from Volnius, the Etruscans had taken the basic storyline and composed something new that made more sense to Etruria. We have lost the screenplay. But we have the film-stills.

BACKDATING 10/9