The BACKDATE roundup

This August was among the worst months in this blog's history, beat out by last November. Dog Days indeed! Mostly I'm blaming the news because there wasn't much worth commenting. But also I found other things to do.

Here is what I did: porting fun games from ye olde Color Computer News over to C#. Incidentally I also learnt some basics on hooking Visual Studio up with Git. From July 1982 is Mark Barnes' GoldMine; from the ensuing September is Steve Sullivan's Venus Lander.

I don't know if either were classics. GoldMine did at least adapt a classic algorithm, a 1981 random maze generator. (I have it as pseudorandom.) Lander games were already old hat by late 1982: even on the CoCo, even allowing for the CoCo News' late spring publication hiccup. This one, I argue, had some art style.

I suppose I could ask if anyone else has already done these, as well. Google isn't coming up with anything.

ZFPM1 to GSDMC

We've had the horse since our Yamnaya days... attached to the wheel and chariot. Why didn't they just throw on some Comanche blankets and ride into battle directly?

Here's the study: the horse did indeed get friendly in 3000 BC, gene "ZFPM1". But they only got rideable (aside maybe for slender Scythian women) around 2200 BC. GSDMC, which apparently is less-great for us humies.

The Shroud of Turin is fake

Some old news that shouldn't surprise any triple-digit-IQ today... and didn't surprise them in mediaeval days, either.

The debunking in question comes from Nicole Oresme, before he became bishop of Lisieux AD 1377. Back then (before the Schism), thoughtful skeptics were allowed into the Church and, it seems, promoted. Especially during the Plague the Church couldn't have popular cults springing up and introducing chaos.

This blog wholly endorses the practice of taking the spiritual to evaluate the useful-physical. It happens that sometimes the "spiritual" is just fake.

Next, do the Mandylion.

The parasite does not befriend the host

Mikhail Черновић and other Internet Slavs are on the case of the Demons. NephCon aside, we have good data on parasites and how they act... like a demon might.

I am unsure how far prayer helps directly. What does help directly is expulsion of the parasites. Ivermectin does this. So does the old-fashioned way: fasting. It may be that prayer, by subordinating (what you think is) your will to an outside power, shows you where your will is becoming the wasps' will.

Yesterday one Joseph Noel Walker raised that Darwin's stomach problems came from some parasite or other. Usually here is cited the helicobacter, famously to be discovered by a mad lad who infected himself by design. Seriously: do not try this at home.

Back to the Christians I wonder how many other nasty Late Antique bugs were solved by going out into the desert and subsisting on sterilised foods, like dried unleavened bread left out to be nuked by the dry sun. Not all the Orthodox hermits are to be dismissed.

Darwin, overall, was a man ahead of his time. But an Orthodoxy behind his time might have saved him.

When the daimyos ruled England

Yesterday Anton Howes analysed England's century of authoritarian oligarchy. The Parliament was then held by landholding agricultural interests, "lords" and "nobles" - also bishops. They (mostly Norman) had been able to exploit a low-class (Saxon) peasantry. Then this miserable population got culled, by fleas. The survivors swiftly learnt the upside: they could bargain for higher wages.

The nobles reacted: by wage controls. In England (and Norway) the nobles further introduced the Letter Testimonial (in excellent Norman legalese). Howes equates the Letter to a Chinese hukou passport: the villein (serf) didn't get to move from his lord's manor to some better-paying lord's, or to repopulate those cities.

I don't know that Howes says this, but the fourteenth-century power-grab by the aristos made critical that aristos stay aristo. For awhile they could still gain lands and booty in France, thank you Henry V. But after the early 1400s that didn't last. I suspect the Wars Of The Roses resulted, as lords fought lords.

This all started under Edward III. "Ēadweard" is a Saxon name. One wonders if he were wiser to have held himself as the King of the English, as to revisit the nobles' privileges from the Great Charter.

Sargasso farming

I still can't say I got a lot going on, but I did come across this Youtube about the Sargasso. That's the sea which discouraged the Lishbunatis from further west, or southwest. Today I learnt that in 2020 it shifted south. I don't know if it has shifted as far south as Barbados, but it's dumping a lot of sargassum onto the northern isles. Where it dies, and rots. This smells bad for tourists and kills fish for everyone.

The good news is that rotting weeds can be contained to give off methane, a more-or-less clean source of energy on small scales... like what they want for small islands. It's not like it's any worse for "Global Warming" than letting the rubbish dump the methane right into the air before the locals can use it.

Also - apparently - this weed can supplement brickmaking.

They are even making biodegradable shirts with it. That is nice overall given the planet has too many junk shirts, and Caribbean nations have to be tempted to dump their waste overall into that ocean. For whatever reason Shein is being blamed for textile-pollution. Shein is already unpopular given their record on, uh, slavery (ain't there a Commandment against that?). But back onto topic: good plan.

Chum

We coders have disdained Bill Gates since maybe the 1980s, when his BASIC insisted on keeping the GOTOs in the TSR-80. Then he created a foundation, which his divorcée Melinda took over to make #woke. What Gates has left to him, he still tends to misuse, often in the name of The Climate. (Oblig'ref to the late Mr Epst**n.) Gates isn't as evil as some of his WEF peers, but that's a very low bar. Harrumpf.

Having set that 'rumpf-stake: Gates is right on laboratory-grown meats. National Review as usual is wrong.

As Razib Khan keeps saying on X, it doesn't compete with your ribeye or wagyu. It competes with your cheeseburger, like the Impossible tried to do; and with "the TV dinner". The Impossible failed, sure. Grown meats shouldn't have the same nutrient deficiencies and chemical waste as the late Impossible. They should be more like bean burgers (which are great, if crumbly); or shiitake (also yummy).

I see the "beef it's what's for dinner" lobbyists have pushed to criminalise lab meat in Texas and Florida. And various AI slop peddlers on youtube keep raising Gates' mug because We All Know What That Means.

The agricultural cartel was last seen trying to get screwworm-infested herds into the US, and have generally been a bane to US immigration policy. That's a feature for NR these days; but never mind them. I suggest the Right not side with the cartel and the bought-off pseudoRight.

Lab Grown Meat: It's What's For The Microwave.

BACKDATE 8/27 in light of the Arabella news.

Cosmic Conquest

Going through old Color Computer News magazines, I found that some of them referred to other computer magazines - like those which might target a higher-end, "university" audience. One of these was BYTE. So then I got looping through BYTE.

Over 1982, concurrently with (arguably) the best year of CoCoNews, BYTE was posting the winners of a game-writing competition. Since at the time I was, uh, eight years old I hadn't actually read any BYTE.

Most of the games were for the Apple micro-computers. As hinted, my dialect was for the (Tandy/Microsoft) CoCo. If you, presumably not an eight year old boy, know CoCo MS Basic: you could probably grok most of the Apple's. I should have been able to handle that magazine's Apple games in the middle 1980s if not in 1982, although I don't know about Microsofting them (1989?).

What strikes me now is that, although everyone read BYTE back then, few seem to have remembered the actual winner of the comp. That would be Cosmic Conquest. Problem: it's not in Basic... at all. Alan Sartori-Angus did this in some Apple dialect of Forth nobody knows anymore. You'll remember (IBM-DOS) Forth from Starflight published 1986 - and its mod/sequel/cashin, which as far as I know was the last commercial run at a Forth game.

About four years ago some mad lads brought Conquest to a modern, hobbyist Forth. That's Rick Carlino; in 2022 Wargaming Scribe reviewed that. A year later some youtuber "I Shoot DVCAM" got the sprites working on an Apple II emulator.

Some oldschool type-em-up games have passed Chronus' test. People still enjoy lunar-lander, and Zork - even Rogue. Conquest left the awards with a blue ribbon and nothing else. It is in "the history of RTS" as a sideshow if that. For the reviewer, it squeaks into the RTS genre by dint of not being turnbased; although even here, under the hood, it is turnbased.

I have no dispute with the Conquest verdict of "totally obsolete". I do, however, dispute that this game belongs with Broderbund's The Ancient Art of War. Where Conquest really belongs is behind Master of Orion (which admittedly also has Civilization DNA) and, more-obscure, Reach For The Stars.

BACKDATE 8/30

Jemdet Nasr at Oman

As we're talking preUruk in the coastal Iraq: here's Magan - as Sumer and Akkad will call it. Only here the focus isn't Uruk.

The specific preUruk culture which Magan imported was جمدة نصر. That's the culture just upriver to those Uruk marshes 3100-2900 BC. So the Iraq's navigators knew of Oman centuries before they stuck the "Magan" label upon it, usually dated 2300 BC.

Some of what they traded was shells, which seems more Uruk than Jemdet-Nasr. I take it that Jemdet-Nasr could farm crops simply impossible in the briny marshes. If the middlemen were Sumerian, this can explain how Uruk/Sumer was able to supplant the up-river.

BACKDATE 8/29 h/t Archaeology.org.

Aliens in the Smithsonian

Jason Colavito argues that the NephCon is taking the Smithsonian. At least, I think he's arguing that.

It blasts a barrage of facts, at least I think they're facts, about Smithsonian controversies of yore. The Smithsonian is in historic Dixieland between (as of, oh, AD 1785) a moderate Catholic state (Maryland) and a moderate Episcopalian one (Virginia). These aren't really the founding states of the US, nor do their elites represent prole Americans. As a result, when Administrations have taken over since then, the victors want the Smithsonian as a spoil.

One might write an article about that. But that article would have to mention Whiteness. It would have to mention how both central MD and north VA have become colonies of Cambridge, MA; alienating (per the polls) over half the country outside the region.

One might even write the irony of Pat Buchanan loudly supporting the bombing of Nagasaki in the 1980s, against his progeny in the Catholic Right which boo-hoo-hoo's about poor Nagasaki's great Cathedral and how the whole war wasn't worth the US' bother. (If pressed most'll say they're just asking questions.)

I don't think Alberino quite counts, Cernovich aside. Colavito was doing better, earlier.

The New Republic is trying to be the next Wall Street Journal, I guess. Just another partisan broadsheet, canting slogans.

BACKDATE 8/29

Cairo MS 247

On the 19th, Shaker and el-Khatib released some real scholarship, may it serve as an example to other Arabs. This attaches Cairo MS 247 "Maṣāḥif" to another muṣḥaf, Berlin 4313. The latter was known to Bergsträsser (as "Qāf 47") and photographed, although only its photos have survived the wars and Ideologies.

Cairo ends at Q. 4:137, where Berlin picks up v. 138. Corpus Coranicum makes use of Berlin.

The paper takes the opportunity to run some textual analysis. The reading of both is more-or-less Ibn ʿĀmir (d. 118/736), often opposed to the Warsh or the "Cairo" each of which north Africans use today. The reading which interests the authors most is Dūād (sic; ḥamza) for Dāwūd, which they argue is ancestral, with "Dāwūd" being "ʿajamī" (Iran?). I take further that the sura order of the two reünited MSS is 3-4-5-6 against Ibn Masʿud 4-3-etc; and that the variants are nondramatic. So, generally Umayyad; as befits a MS of Umayyad Egypt.

The parent MS is dated even to ʿUthmān himself. I am unsure of that much; the text runs 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, and 21 and I don't think sura 21 nor even 14 be this early. But: it lacks the sura headers and dividers of (say) the Birmingham MS. It could well be copied from a Sufyānid basis with others brought in under ʿAbd al-Malik.

BACKDATE 8/28

The tidal civilisation

Sumer is considered a river civilisation like Egypt. Phys.org has Liviu Giosan and Reed Goodman, on Uruk which they date 4000-3200 BC (Wiki would say, overlapping Ubeyd down to 3700 BC). They argue that this Uruk civilisation - yes, Sumerian - started not along the Tigris (much less Euphrates) but through the Marsh.

The paper points out that the flood/farm cycles don't match in Iraq like they do (rather, pre-Nasser - did) in Egypt. I assume the Nile Delta could have supported a low-level culture too, but didn't need to scale up to a river civilisation. Well-fed Upper Egypt could just conquer the villages down there, mostly to establish trade-ports.

Back to Sumer, this has two deltas at first: Euphrates and "Khuzestan". The locals weathered the 6200 BC freeze and the various droughts. But the deltas merged over the next millennium. 5500 BC commences the "Ubeid" ceramic style. The tides had declined so by the late Uruk era 3500 BC, there's no direct record left in Sumerian - save myths, about separating the sweet water from the brine, tropes alien to the Semites and Egyptians.

The good news for Sumer: lessons learnt from that elder hydrology could scale to the impressive irrigation of Uruk and beyond.

A pack of marsh Karankawa suddenly ratcheting up to agriculture explains why Sumerian is an isolate, unrelated to Hurrian / Semitic / Elamite. Everybody ignored those swampy yokels, excepting the odd trader. Until suddenly they couldn't be ignored. If the culture had come from the Euphates we'd expect it to be Akkadian-only; likewise, if across the Tigris, Elamite-only.

I would however like to know more of Ubeid upriver. They weren't as good as irrigation, but they did do some, and herded cattle as well. Their villages weren't as hierarchical as was Gilgamesh's city; Ubeid was more like Cucuteni in this. City-names like Arbela-Erbil and Babil (Babylon) are still not comprehensible as Semitic or Sumerian. So who were they?

Pons-Brooks again

Pons-Brooks, or "12P", is a shortish-period comet which Daniel Kirkwood calculated had got diverted - by Neptune - AD 991ish. Carl Sagan made it famous by not reading Kirkwood and claiming it had something to do with Chinese history - which it did not. It got to aphelion again last year although I wasn't paying attention.

Nature Astronomy was paying attention. So now 12P is famous again: its water is Earthlike. Of course it didn't contribute any water to us; the comet is still out there. But it formed with other comets as reached the inner solar system.

Trappist 1-d

I've been on other projects which I am hoping to post on other fora, so have neglected this blog. I do wish to discuss Trappist 1's inner planets meanwhile. JWST has a report on -d.

The present consensus runs that -c is airless. This was thought for innermost -b too; now, JWST claims -b has thick supercritical carbon-dioxide atmosphere "with a hydrocarbon smog". The present study looks at -d. This like -c has turned up nothing.

"Turns up nothing" doesn't mean nothing; Mars has something, but Elon doesn't care, since we cannot breathe on it. More of interest for -d is the counterclaim: that a thick cloudlayer shrouds the dark side. We'd be able to see the edges of that at the edges of either transit. Climate models - they say - allow this for such an insolation around such a red-shifted star.

My counter to the counter: planetary-formation models. Trappist-1's planets are in mutual resonance. They formed where they are without interference. Then the star did its T-Tauri thing. The T-Tauri phase enforced a coal line, which starts far away from -d. These planets, then, did not form with water. Nor with ammonia, methane what-have-you.

Whaddabout Venus, I hear my readers. To whom I am sympathetic. I did think T1-c, closer to the star, would be a Venuslike! but... it's not. As for T1-d, Venus is more massive. When our Sun was T-Tauri, Venus was further away than T1 b,c,d to T1... by a lot.

I'd hold the counterclaim for some other inner-HZ planet in a nonresonant M system.

Paul of Tella

Sean Anthony considers whether the Qâric umma was in fact a politeia. The whole thing is as-yet unavailable; so I'll tackle the first bit, which engages in a spot of trolling about Paul of Tella.

Thus far, this here blog has known Paul for his upgrade of the "Septuagint" Bible in its Syriac form. I did not know that he had created a subculture to use it. As such, Paul would sit after such fifth-century extremist Syrian Ephesians as Rabbula. Rabbula, technically, was still in communion with the Purple; Anastasius was in his party. Justinian... maybe not as much. Anyway Paul didn't see him as such. Paul would end his days in the plague year our AD 538.

Over in Egypt Peter IV and Damian will be following Paul's example. The whole of Coptic Egypt, in effect, will become Anastasius' church in exile, a sort of river-long hermitage.

BACKDATE 8/30

Let the dildoes hit the floor

In theme with the Why Do They Hate Us commenting this weekend, let's speculate on why it's raining men (ay-men) on the WNBA courts. To the point there's now a dong dome.

I must throat-clear that this blog opposes the schlong. The author has one of his own which causes him more trouble than, perhaps, he deems worth keeping. I don't care to see more. Harrumph! ... but.

I used to appreciate the Girl Boss in adolescence. Relevant to WNBA, our family would go out to see the Comets in Houston. It was a passable and inexpensive way to pass the time - and a safe space to watch girls in motion, which most boys rather enjoy. If the fans in the stands were also girls with less reciprocal interest in boys, if they weren't being hostile to boys I could take it.

What has happened lately is the hostility to boys. Articles came out whispering of a lavender mafia in the cloakrooms. Lately the WNBA put out a po-faced conference where they were talking about the dildoes being yet another manifestation of "sexualizing women". They could take gaslighting lessons from Lord Roberts.

The WNBA has other issues. Garner got busted in Russia and her comments about men trickled out, also. (For whom, we traded the subject of Lord of War.) The WNBA blathered about paying them what we owe them, as if the free-market wasn't doing that already. Somewhere around here was the racism against Caitlin Clark, although that's less an issue for me I'll admit. We might also discuss all the PRIDE flags waving around, and good-luck if you're wearing a MAGA hat because that's "political" which the PRIDE isn't we're told.

As noted, I don't support throwing stuff on the court. I agree, it's dangerous. If you don't like the way the WNBA treats men or even normal women, then don't go.

Pay the WNBA what we owe them. Which - to me, right now: is nothing.

Power to Truth in the House of Lords

I had access to a printed Wall Street Journal this morn. In it was a "Review" piece by some Lord Andrew Roberts, about Churchill's legacy and those who oppose it. The Lord couched the piece as an explainer: why do certain people, clearly not the Lord's sort of people, drag down this hero.

In it was a side-swipe at David Irving as a "neo-nazi historian". Which you can just... say, in the Yookay; because Lipstadt won her libel case. The nuances don't matter, you can say things and dare anyone to come to this man's defence.

With that in mind, Roberts goes on to say the reason people "hate" Churchill on the "far" right is because they like authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno lives!

If you actually listen to the antiChurchill / altRight intersection, they aren't shy on telling everyone the real reason. It is because they feel like they've been cheated. Moldbug Yarvin used to talk about feeling "jobbed"; hoe_math is lately talking about how we tried MORE than you. hoe_math for one feels bitter about this; that his kinfolk have given over their cities to those who say you are sad, worthless individuals destined for the hellfire; unless you embrace Islam.

People like that, like William Golding's avatar in Free Fall, stuck on the outs, will ask how they lost their freedom. One answer offered to them is - Churchill took it from them. Or maybe the Jews did; whatever. That isn't the focus of this post.

The focus of this post is what should have been Roberts' focus, why Rightists out on the fringe reject Churchill to the point they feel hatred. Roberts did not answer that question. And his non-answer went to its own extreme, as a refusal. Lord Andrew Roberts is the mirror image to a Holocaust denier. Roberts is even more far gone than an Occidental Observer editor.

The question one might pose is, why does Andrew Roberts hate the Right so much. Although I suspect the real emotion he holds is fear.

BACKDATE 8/10

The American lemur

Vox Day linked University of Reading on primate origins. Ideologues like Beale never link "scientody" for its own sake; it's always about casting new discoveries as "epicycles" against "Darwin".

If you read the article for its own sake, we learn how animals evolve - through where, and when. The geography wasn't the same in the Eocene as it is now. Neither was the climate. In the elder days of the early Caenozoic, Europe was more like an island-chain, with a Pannonian Sea in what's now Hungary. It was also warmer: a common ancestor to the falcon and the parrot flitted about Denmark. There was much rejoicing among Monty Python fans.

For basis: the mammalian life that emerged after Chicxulub was dispersed and very different between South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. North America had dogs, horses, camels. South America of course was marsupial - spreading across a then-temperate Antarctica to Australia. Africa had the elephant, and hyaena/cats I think.

The paper-proper argues that primates should be listed with North America and not with Europe. North America does not benefit from the currents which keep Europe from being East Labrador. The paper argues that North America wasn't always temperate back then, either. It might even have been worse than Antarctica at the time.

The ur-primate would have been like a dwarf lemur, with hibernation properties. The primate could also migrate better than other animals at the time. I am reminded of Dinosaur (2000) with lemurs and dinosaurs witnessing the asteroid together.

Now: if the dwarf lemur originated in America, I am keen to understand how it got to Europe and then Africa (thence Malagasy) before rafting back to South America / Mesoamerica. Because the Americas nowhere have lemurs. I admit, this won't be the last time North America spawns a species as dies out at home: cf the camel.

BACKDATE 8/10

The plague of Jerash

For whatever reason I didn't discuss Adapa et al. so let's this "today": At Gerash in what's now the kingdom of Jordan, was found a mass grave.

Gerash as a good Hellenistic-Roman city owned a hippodrome. Over Late Antiquity, lookin' like post-Zenobia, the locals lost interest in that sport. But its architecture was still excellent, boasting many delightfully cool basements. So the local potters took up the space for their industry and storage. Then came the Year Without A Sun; and Justinian's Flea. It seems it got re-repurposed as a mass morgue, where the bodies were left literally to rot.

As a cool space in a near-desert, these bodies stayed preserved until the recent study. Which is proving that, yes, the plague of Gerash was indeed the Flea - the Yersinia. I am pretty sure we already knew that, but from remains preserved far from the Jordan, so this evidence is better.

BACKDATE 8/28

A failure at the gate

Dr "Tron Honto" Anthony goes back to his reviewer roots and has at Ibrahim Mohamed Zein and Ahmed El-Wakil. The latter of whom we've met.

A major university of Qatar approved this thing - which we must sigh and accept, as a product of Qatari geopolitik. More troubling, for the rest of us, is that Routledge published it. Thus, with Craig Considine, laundering Islamic-"revert" John Andrew Morrow.

Honest scholars would have taken Considine to task by way of taking Morrow's selfpub seriously. But Zein and el-Wakil are no more honest than is Considine. An honest publisher would have refused their book, as transparently taking current-year kumbaya over Veritas. Routledge seems no longer an honest publisher. I am reminded how the Slavic Orthodoxy still clings to the Constitutio ascribed to Constantine, infamous for the donatio. Anyway, now Dr Anthony can't ignore el-Wakil (or Zein), although I bet the duo are now wishing he had.

Anthony devotes footnote #4 for better scholarship. Some of it has been used at this my blog; others may supplement it. Here I discuss the late-'Abbasi redo of the "Pact of 'Umar"; here I discuss Lecker on the correspondence which Mirza may supplement.

BACKDATE 8/28

Justinian's adventure

In 2018, Peter Heather published Rome Resurgent, a military evaluation of Justinian's foreign wars mostly in the west (alt-title Making Rome Great Again). Academia.edu has raised Parnell's review of it.

The Greek and Slavic Orient has long hailed Justinian as "the Great" or even as a Saint, like Louis IX for the French. Secular Westerners have also tended to see Justinian positively; more so as his legal code was rediscovered in the High Middle Ages. The primary exception has been the Church, still sore about the kidnapping of Vigilius. Lately, Western scholars have asked if Justinian was right to carry on to a large war over here, rather than concentrating on the Persian front, which - as Procopius already observed at the time - was existential.

Heather splits the difference.

The Vandal kingdom, from its first African beachhead throughout the various Roman and Byzantine efforts to dislodge it, had been lucky. Its army was optimised for fending off Berber raids; its navy was a pirate flotilla. Justinian, more competent than Leo and better supplied than Majorian, tore through it handily. And then Justinian was able to hold it against those Berbers. Heather argues that the expedition paid for itself. (We might, in hindsight, ask if the East Roman Empire needed another potential base for rival Emperors.)

The problem of course was Italy (Heather adds Baetica, the province in Spain). Nobody can argue that the Italian wars were anything but a headache - well, nobody excepting star-struck mediaeval romantics.

I don't know that Heather has added much to our understanding; in 2018, a cursory flip didn't uncover any, and I didn't buy the book. Parnell's main questions concern common army life, which featured in 2010s-decade monographs Heather didn't read; and the plague. That peste is a burning question in scholarship which - I agree - requires an accounting in any study of the post-536 years.

BACKDATE 8/10

Metastable nitrogen

Awhile ago I was pondering metastable nuclei as a detonator. The notion is that when it releases energy, what's left isn't pollutive nor radioactive. Late June, we heard of hexanitrogen. That's N₆ in a chain; the authors call it C_2h-N₆.

The advantage of this molecule is that its decay-product becomes part of the propellant. Those nuclei by contrast were just a fast-n'-furious heat source. That makes the N_n a rocket-fuel, perhaps in a 3D-printed ring of nozzles (I cannot see controlling much of it in one place). As the decay-product should, further, just be nitrogen (we better be keeping oxygen far from it) it should also be good for blasting at sea-level and not be a space-only thing like, oh, hydrazine.

What I don't know is if this molecule will store well. People keep talking hydrogen as fuel but it doesn't store. This fuel looks like a monster.

BACKDATE 8/4

Why Scythia failed

Fructose is considered harmful, and now we're doing something about it. This reminds me of a genetics article I should have posted last month but didn't: the Scythians didn't like it either.

On the one hand, this may explain how come Scythians (and Cimmerians) although able to conquer Anatolia, and beyond, weren't much able to keep these lands. Other Iranic groups had less trouble. (Hello? Persians?)

The deep steppe couldn't handle the wine, dates, and raisins. The genetics claim the Scythians did better among their Balto-Slavic kin, hence all those Iranic (read: not Baltic) rivers: Don and Dneiper and Danube.

I have one question remaining, given Scythians didn't eat fruit. Whence were they getting their Vitamin C? UPDATE 8/10 Fermenting the fructose into cider?