A hundred tonnes at a time

TransAstra proposes to shift 100 tonnes of rock from near-Earth space to Earth space (or Lunar).

ToughSF prefers this over sending humans over to the rocks. Longterm I agree. What's a Bennu orbit compared to a planetary orbit, or a Lagrangian or even the 13:10:8 Laplacian? People should live on natural ports-of-call.

And some of those rocks are eminently movable. 740 missions by such robots and they could disassemble all Bennu, or at least the parts colonists want; and bring its pieces to, oh, STL4 or to a soft landing on the Lunar equator. In the other direction Casey Handmer can yeet Lunar regolith and maybe even Lunar-assembled critical parts - somehow; and catch them at TLL2.

Cooling the halo

This morn we posted Orion's answer to the Halo: the spinning wheel is supported by a nonspinning magnetic shell. Like a lobster is boiled in its own shell.

You see, the older, simpler, thicker shell can offer something Elliot Orion Ruzicka hasn't considered: heat exchange. The outer shell gets outfacing radiators pointing in any direction. But... if there's a vacuum between the habitat and the outer shell, how's the habitat getting its heat to the outer shell?

Perhaps the separative medium is an efficiently-conductive gas. Like hydrogen. Superheated hydrogen between our oxygen-infused habitat and the outer shell, which spin we maintain by some turbine in the hub of the spokes. Oh the humanity.

Nah. The outer shell has to be a half shell, reflective on the outside. The radiators are then attached to the inner shell orthogonal to the direction of spin, or maybe tilted slightly outward.

As they say, amateurs study engineering; professionals study thermodynamics.

Breaking diameters

Been a hot minute since I last dropped in on the ToughSF X account. Ten days ago it linked to a cycler plan - to which I may or may not get. Right now I'd like to discuss its own source, Elliott Orion Ruzicka's submission to the IAF's 75th congress 2024. In his capacity as head of "Orbital Design" in New York.

That's a "Mr.", not a "Dr.". Shows how much credentials matter for awesome material-science papers.

Ruzicka notes that the Halo doesn't work, much less the Ringworld. Since they both spin, each puts pressure on her outer wall. Maximum pressure happens to correlate with radius (or diameter, or circumference): F / gr. Humans like g=9.8 m/s². I'm willing to negotiate for Venereal 8.7 - but now we have to consider the tensile strength of the outer hull, and how thick that might be. The outer shell can't be allowed to dip much less than 9.8.

Given alla'that, cometh our list of tensile materials before this contraption flies apart. As usual Kevlar is in here, maxing out 0.513 mega-meters... 513 km across. As a post-1980 paper we can also use Zylon 759 km. Nanotubes and graphene also make their appearances but I consider them unobtania. Six years ago our boy ToughSF related the T1100G. This was density 1790 and max force 7000 MPa. That last looks rounded: I get 400 km radius = 800 km diameter.

Janhunen's dumbbell and Jensen's smaller stuff were keeping it to decakilostructures, fit for high Earth orbit where space is at a premium and we don't want to bombard our green home. The max-out hectakilostructures were more than enough and, who cared about muh nanotubes. Ruzicka, mad lad, wants a MEGA structure. He floats up to 102,040 km held by 100 m of graphene; compare Earth equatorial 12,756 km... or Saturn 120,536 km. Maybe keep this monster at Venus Equilateral.

But even if we're not demanding this absurd artificial subSaturn, Ruzicka can still save on construction-material to keep it together. A 10,204 km subEarth might need that 100 m now; this would go down to 9.09 m.

Ruzicka's magic is in installing a torus within a torus. The outer ring keeps the micrometeors out and does not spin. Only the inner ring rotates for the artificial gravity. The inner and outer rings are thereby decoupled. They just need to keep from mutually crashing into each other, which can be gently nudged by magnets.

Ruzicka proposes to spin it up in the first place, by - you guessed it - magnets (but stronger). This will require the outer ring to spin in the opposite direction, at first; but this can be mitigated either by using rocket-engines or, better, building two at a time to spin in opposite directions, which would cancel each other's twists.

THERMO 9:50 AM: A hot minute indeed.

The book of Psalm 108-110

We have a few articles by Christians asserting that the early Church read the Psalter - which is our Psalter - as a unity, a single book. Lately: SD Ellison (which I haven't read) and James Hamilton Jr (pdf - have read). Maybe Jon Alan Ginn. Let us ponder unity as unification.

The Greek translation is pretty-much just the MT here except enumerated with some offsets. Qumran has some differences to be discussed (soon!). Our main topic is the Psalms triplet 108-110 in MT, 107-109 in Greek. If deliberate, the editor presented Psalm 109 as a royal work alongside 108 and 110.

Most agree the edition of this last fifth of the Psalter dates well after the exile, adopting Psalm 137 among others. The collection's motive would be that of Messianism: the people didn't necessarily have a king in those days, so - they wanted one. Note that this is the fifth where Qumran rates the collection as fluid-enough that variant orders can be ventured, secondary or not; Qumran does not venture this for Psalms 1-88.

I stress this does not mean all these Psalms were composed for that editorial purpose. Psalm 137 didn't expect any king but God. We are, for now, discussing the edition, which allows for angry strays like Psalm 137 to exist along more-hopeful work.

Psalm 109 would then be such an angry stray. It reads like a curse tablet. The man is going before the court with a satan at his right v. 6, an accuser human or otherwise. Instead the man requests YHWH at his right v. 31. Thematically it leads well into Psalm 110.

Somebody moved to the Chincha valley

When the Huari ruled, they dealt with postMoche coastal peoples without much conquering them. Then around AD 1100 the Huari collapsed. We next find people harvesting guano... much further south, in the Chincha vale. AD 1250 is about when they start advertising their birdey wares on pots.

The link between the Chincha of their guano era, and their northern postMoche origins, now exists from genetics.

As to: why the migration. Uh. We have evidence for rather a lot of upheaval around that continent, from the 1200s (thirteenth century) on.

Once having migrated, the Chincha jealously maintained their culture, some even being endogamous. The language of that coast when the Inca came was Coastal Quechua; "Chincha" itself means "ocelot" in that language. The homeland of "Quechua I" also lies north of Cuzco; which highlands today speak an archaic dialect called Huanca (no jokes plz).

I suspect the Huanca and the majority Chincha both descend from the Huari, who spoke Quechua. The bird-doo-doo people, as coastal... I doubt. Their ancestors had spoken something more Mochean-era in northern Peru, if not Mochic itself; further, I expect they maintained their nonQuechua language among the Chinca. This is difficult to tell because both the Inca and the Spaniards discouraged indigenous languages as weren't Quechua or Aymara.

What happened to Arab astrology?

Antoine Borrut has a book out, Astrology and History in Early Islam. You may read its introduction on academia.edu.

Several chronicles in the early centuries anchored themselves in astrologic observances... in Babylonia. The 'Abbasid moment was similarly Babylonian, at heart. So great astrologers invented mathematical tools... in London. Al-Khwarizmi had done so first. As Borrut points out, our modern disdain for astrology is postNewtonian. One is tempted to put a boldface over "post".

Devout Muslims like Ibn Jarîr Tabarî had disdained astrology before us, from a reading of sura 6 (the fifth for Ibn Mas'ud and Ubay) amid general distaste for antique quackery. But old habits died hard. Christians like James/Jacob of Edessa were using astronomical tables to peg their annals; indeed the very annalistic form had come out of old Babylonian habits. This is in fact a major boon to us moderns, who can use their mention of eclipses, comets and even aurorae against what we know of the eclipse cycle and of visible comets, also lately tree-ring anomalies.

Perhaps universities should force history departments to install a mandatory astrology course. We could host it in the 200/2000 range.

Ancient liturgies

Short one for now: Philip Jenkins shows where to find lost text. Namely, embedded in other text, as the Didache is embedded in the Apostolic Constitutions, Jude in 2 Peter, and Aristides in the Life of Barlaam and Ioasaph. This blog has occasionally delved into Archaic Hebrew works in late Classical stuff like Habakkuk. Or maybe 2 Isaiah in the 1QIsa^a. Or all this stuff.

One fascinating thought is the ancient Christian liturgy. Paul in 1 Corinthians famously cites a formula of the Last Supper. Why would the Last Supper matter? Perhaps because every Christian was already reënacting some sort of postJudaic Messianic-Banquet. In fact the younger Pliny must report on a weekly ritual meal from Bithynia. The war of the Diaspora (mostly Cyprus and Cyrene) was approaching but Pliny's Christians were gentiles so wouldn't be affected. That liturgy was certainly the same as Ignatius was recommending at around that time; or the Didache 9. Note, as with John neither require a Last Supper.

But as Paul embeds some rituals of the, what, AD 50s; so other texts were embedding other rituals. Occasionally a gnostic text will involve people banding together to make some weird chant in a weird direction. Like the Acts of John section C chapter 94 - not just a hymn of Jesus, but stage-direction.

Proxima d

The inner planet of the closest stellar system to ours now has more evidence behind it. Kyplanet reports: interactions, with the chromosphere (above the photosphere which is the visible disc). Elsewhere reported: YZ Ceti, and the aging Sol-like HIP 67522.

Besides pretty-much proving that Prox d even exists, which I didn't rate obvious three/four years ago, we get some constraints on what d is. At M sin i of 0.26 M_⊕ it is rocky, with a magnetic field. The field isn't well constrained except that it's enormous. The sucker's enough to raise flares on a red dwarf. It's much greater than ours on Earth and might even be superJovian although Kyplanet doubts this.

Among the constraints we don't got, besides planetary inclination, would be a map of Prox' magnetic field. Zeeman Doppler Imaging has mapped such field for YZ Ceti - at 3.6pc: a sun's flares coincide with exoplanet crossings of the Alfvén surface as the planet orbit approaches the stellar magnetic equator. I suspect we can measure, by this, both the inclination of the stellar rotation relative to us; and that of the planet's orbit relative to the star.

Prox is closer us at 1.302pc. So that's a tool I'd suggest for the Prox team.

In addition: if some better-constrained nearby planets, like, oh, TRAPPIST-1 b, are not raising flares: is this because they are insufficiently inclined against their stars? I think resonant systems like this one might not be much so inclined.

As for Prox b, this may have a magnetic field too. It's too small and far to be inducing flares itself but the d-induced flares seem modulated by... something. The planet b is bigger than d so if d held onto a dynamo, why not b. Kyplanet is careful here to note that some of the outside interference might not come from b but from an "e" between d and b, or a retrograde capture inward of d (I find this unlikely).

The first Book Of Isaiah

Davila had posted the Isaiah Scroll commentary this very morn. He asserts, from evidence elsewhere, we should be thinking of an Isaiah of 1-33 and then an Extension To Isaiah 34ff. Our Isaiah 34-5 belong to the second Isaiah. The 36-9 drop-in would then be done by the Extender.

The Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a may be the very autograph of our Isaiah - and of the Greek.

I might explain the Peshitta thus: Oriental Jewish traditions stubbornly held on containing only 1-33, inasmuch Zionism mattered less to the Diaspora. The Isaiah-to-Syriac project was done by Christians juggling between a Hebrew (or Bavli-Aramaic) 1-33 / 34f tradition and a Greek 1-29 / 30f tradition... and by then also Jewish copies of the G.I.S. what we simply know as Masoretic.

That Greek translator, for his part, never had a tradition of Isaiah 1-33 by itself, or if he did he abandoned it so started from scratch.

Isaiah's sawmill

Most today put the second Isaiah from chapter 40 on. It's a nice round number and it follows Isaiah 36-9 which is an obvious narrative drop-in from the Deuteronomist. In antiquity, other splits existed. The Sahidic Copts split after 30:5 and 46; but that translation came from the Septuagint. From Hebrew the Peshitta split after 33 although at least the later translators worked across those bounds.

Rossella Tercatin last January reported on the Great Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa^a. This is, famously, Masoretic. Less-famously it comes from two scribes; which scribes tried to harmonise their efforts. But that's a curiosity not worth the blogging.

Marcello Fidanzio has raised a point worth the blogging. The first part of the scroll was preëxistent. It was an old parchment that had to be patched-up and corrected. The second part was simply copied anew from some other text, and affixed to the first part.

The kicker: the first part - which is a holdover from the first edition of Isaiah - goes up to chapter 33. Just like the Peshitta. The next part starts at 34 (and then gets 36-9 dropped-in).

The cursed Creation

Paleojudaica is pointing to Andrei Orlov, Cursed Creation. This argues that Job 3 and Job 38 parallel the Enochian myth, not the Biblical.

The parallel is that something proposes to corrupt Creation, by a curse. Required is to heal the land. In Job, God tells the protagonist how He created all things. It turns out Job - mortal - can't curse the world, not by his own say-so anyway. The narrative circle is closed by Job admitting as much.

In Enoch - we are speaking of 1 Enoch 1-36 - the demons come to teach mortals how to spoil everything. God's loyal angels give Enoch a tour of the afterlife such as to make an implicit promise: restoration is coming.

Our books of Ruth and Jonah are known subversions of the mainline Biblical narrative. Jonah is sometimes called a parody of prophets-against-the-goyim; Nahum, against Assyria, being the root of the tree. Job hits the apocalyptic genre, says Orlov. 1 Enoch 1-36 made a major inroad into the Jewish canon. If Job is being ironic, such would put Job's authorship somewhen in the late Persian or Ptolemaic eras.

Orlov thus reinforces James Harding, "Divine Knowledge" (T&T, 2012).

Not all Job is parody. It still relies upon origin-myths. Perhaps Eden and the Serpent, in Genesis Two, is such a one; the Satan already substituting for the Serpent. But we don't see Genesis One. Instead we hear of Tiamat / Leviathan.

The coming of the Anasazi

Our family visited the Chaco Canyon "Anasazi" ruins a long time ago, like summer 1991. My brother went to college around there, later. I don't remember much about the 1991 visit - probably the usual rot about peaceful natives living in harmony with nature until climate chanzzz*snore*. By the late 1990s, some of the shine had come off and we got Serious Discussions. Cannibalism in the valley. Migrations to the Pueblos. Hints that that Navaho/-jo term "Anasazi", which term is hostile, may have been earned honestly - at least by the elite.

Let's revisit. There's a youtube with a Something Was Very Wrong With - series; it looks like a slop account, "Thoughty2" being the origin of the phrase. Still. This notes Mesoamerican influence. If "New Mexico" (and various reference to "Aztecs" in the region) remain insalubrious; something came here to make of the place at least a New Chichen Itzá.

This YTer is arguing that Mesoamerican influence wasn't all chocolate and ballgames. It entered the place in the AD 1000s and then, 1130-50, got to a fever pitch. This coincided with a climate downturn. Starting 1180ish the locals, who were not Mesoamericans, did what the Maya had done in the 900s. They said - this isn't fun anymore, let's get out of here. Several "pueblos", as the Spaniards call them, exist to this day claiming ancestry from the region, some even able to tell you which ruined town they'd left. They don't find "pueblo" offensive but they don't like "anasazi".

They assuredly have some motive to say they dindu nuffin and if there was ever some cannibalism or an "evil spirit" or any of that, it wasn't them doing it. Unfortunately for them, somebody was doing it. They may not have been born anasazis but anasazis were there. People can lie, but forensics can't. And I am loath to call the Navajo, invasive as they are, liars - in this event anyway. They got there well after-the-fact, such as to lack a dog in the fight. (I vaguely recall that they did arrive in time to watch some of the closing festivities or at least to hear some locals deliver some hair-raising tales.)

The Navajo, further, are not those who introduced any of this - too late, remember. So, let's look at the ethnic groups as might have been there before the Navajo showed up. Best I can tell they are three: Hopi, Tiwa, and Keres.

Keres are an isolate. I take them for the true natives here until I can be convinced otherwise.

Tiwa and Tewa look like branches as different as East and (former) West Baltic. The Slavs of that group would be the... Kiowa. Who live very far from there. Some nomadism happened here, like how Apache are the nomadic branch of the Navajo or, better, the Navajo the settled para-Apache. The Kiowa tell no tradition of coming from this desert; instead they say they came from the north. It looks, then, like the Tiwa, Tewa (and we can throw in the Jemez) migrated off the plains into this region, where people were growing food.

Then... are the Hopi. These are related to the Comanche as fellow north-Uto[-Aztecans], but are not Comanche (these also came later) nor Ute. This language family is also intrusive to, really, anywhere northeast of Puerto Penhasco.

However: we are talking about "intrusions" on a potential scale of millennia. How long ago was the Kiowa / Tiwa split? or Hopi / Ute? I don't see these splits as late as AD 1100.

Compromise: the Hopi, speaking the closest language to the Nahuatl Mesoamerica, would have been the choice vector for Anasazic thought into the region.

LHS 1903

Thomas Wilson and-Co. published DOI 10.1126/science.adl2348 last February. Science Daily, late as ever, has delivered the ESA' press release. Adam Mann at Science News might have the better summary.

The LHS 1903 system is 116 ly away, a red dwarf half Solar mass. Its four planets are all too hot as well as tidally-locked. The outer planet e is raising the hype because it is 1.7 Earth radii. Up to now, we tend to get Earthlikes up to 1.6 and then the "superEarths" from 1.8 up, more like miniNeptunes.

LHS 1903 e turns out to be Earthlike in density, not a Neptunian at all. It could have held onto a Venereal cloudy Sudarsky II layer but, it seems, not.

Wilson posits that the system simply ran out of gas, if I may: the "Gas Depleted Formation" / G-DF. The planets formed from the inside, outward. The fourth, and whatever might exist in the habitable zone on out, did not have anything left.

That G-DF model assumes planetary migrations at least for e. And yeah: no migrations for systems like this tend, I think, to produce orbital resonances. The periods are 2.2, 6.2, 12.6, and 29.3 days. Perhaps for b:c:d, 6:2:1 be close-enough (libration?). Planet e as the literal outlier, like Callisto outside Jupiter, demands a different theory. They ponder if it got smashed up early, such that on its final formation out there the ices weren't available.

Jeroboam the Great

The younger but not the lesser Jeroboam is known to have extended his writ over the Negev. Meanwhile an Assyrian fort at Kheleifeh was excavated. This is a fort on the vale between the Dead Sea and Eilat / Aqaba. It's being rethought, in light of 'Ayn-Hatzeba on the Israeli side, closer the salt sea. Some trash there now has a carbon-date.

This blog is on record as holding carbon dating at about the same level of credibility as the Bible, which is - let us say - conditional. Dendrochronology, which I like better, is hard in a region where trees barely exist. Luckily the Israel Antiquities Authority brings additional evidence.

A third site exists, known to be Israelite: Kuntillet Ajrud, which is more famous than those other two, bearing as it does some local artwork. The only reason to venture this desert is to stop over on a trade-route (or to prey on the traders).

The article points out: Israel, not Judah - and not Damascus. By this time Gath was long gone and so was its destructor Hazael. Israel was returning from its torpor.

Scores had been settled with breakaway Jerusalem also. Its rulers identified with the House of David. To Jeroboam II, Jerusalem's boy king probably mattered about as much as neo-Gath or maybe even Damascus itself: don't raid our caravans and we'll get along. As to why Jeroboam permitted a Davidide identity for that city: the alternative would be Omride, possible through Athaliah of recent memory. David had dubious currency up north where the Omrides had ruled, more recently and more credibly. David, to Jeroboam, was less of a threat where it mattered.

We might hope to see some merchant ostraca. The hope to see some Jeroboam-era literary texts is more like a pipe dream, but we can hope for that too.

SIDENOTE: hat to be tipped to Dr Davila at Paläojudaïca. A lot of my links on this topic come from there. Sometimes he links to something I'd already found on (say) Archaeology or ScienceDaily or TheTorah; sometimes he links over there and I'd have likely found it myself eventually. Not always however, as in this case. Blogspotter to blogspotter: thank you for what you do.

Right vote, wrong man

Newly-lamed quackie Senator Bill has had a change of heart over the Iran !War. Wholly unrelated to the wooden spoon which his Acadiens voters recently delivered to him (not even 1/4!)... or so he'll claim.

Personally I rather liked Cassidy as a Senator. He was holding the line against the execrable Robert Kennedy and his "MAHA" Mansongirls. I can only assume he wanted to hold other lines. Does anyone really think that "fellow RINO" Lindsey Graham would have flipped like this?

Or maybe he is acting out of spite now.

Still... we'll take it.

Which way, young autist?

Cell Genomics does what the magazine does. Journal of Independent Medicine does... one thing.

Like how the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs only does one thing. And I do believe they are connected, as Dr Offit might be able to tell a goy.

Anyway, Laura Loomer seems to understand the Massie coalition of "OG MAGA": MTG and Boebert. The abusers of X's community-note feature; the Paul family. The American Reich; Cenk and Bilzerian. Pence's henchies have likewise slithered in.

They are on the side of disease. Of the demons, in MAHA's case. What, indeed, is to be done?

Ibn Barrajân (and al-Biqâ'î)

Waaay long ago in a library a thousand miles away, I picked up a published tafsîr by al-Biqâ'î. It made several Biblical references as I'd not seen in any other tafâsir. Many of these were referred, or deferred, to an Ibn BRGAN. Later I found out about Ibn Barrajân but, as of 2013, you could download a raw manuscript but not an edition.

Live long enough, and sometimes things change for the better. I am not the only one to travel down the same path; nor, I suspect, the first. Roy McCoy III, or Roy Michael McCoy, has a few articles and a full dissertation. It's not so easy to read the articles but the University of Oxford has generously allowed all to download the dissertation. I assume it's earned for him a PhD now.

Ibn Barrajân was an Andalusian. He was born in Tunis and made his way to Seville. Unfortunately this, and he, ended up under the Almoravids. On AH 536, which is AD 1146, their emir in Marrakesh summoned him and clapped him in irons, where he died.

Yousef Casewit in 2016 floated a summary of Ibn Barrajân's interface with the Bible. By his time, also the time of Ibn Hazm the Zahirite, a Catholic population existed in the Arabophone community. One may compare the Melkites in Jerusalem and Cairo. Outsiders in Spain called them the Musta'rabs, "Mozarab" for those still speaking Iberian Romance. As Arab-speakers, they needed a lection... and, perhaps, a Bible. Local traditions insist they had a Bible although such does not survive.

I am not willing, yet, to credit all this. Assuredly lections, at least, existed. Popular bases for the day's Lesson came from the Creation, from the Abraham/Isaac/Lot cycle, and from Matthew's Gospel. Casewit finds Ibn Barrajân quoting extensively such passages. Enough to finger the source as the Latin Bible; mostly Jerome's, but with a touch of Vetus-Latina as well. I assume Matthew has come from the Byzantine text of emperor Theodosius which Jerome promoted against the Alexandrine.

It is of high interest that Ibn Barrajân considers Matthew the Gospel against Luke. John the high-Christologer offers little of interest for the Moslem, and Mark - although eminently low-christologic - simply doesn't contain all the material one wants. Suras 3 and 19, I had thought, were more tied with Luke or at least with the harmonies. Harmonies existed in Latin and even in Arabic, which we tend to ascribe to relics of the Diatesseron. But not here: only Matthew is here.

Perhaps the Mozarabs were insisting on Matthew-alone so they didn't have to get sura 3 preached at them. Also famous, I must note, is an ancient translation of Matthew into Hebrew which was making the rounds among the Jews, of course not that many of them were much preaching from that book.

Zahirites like Ibn Hazm believed that the Bible was near-worthless, read only to be debunked. Ibn Barrajân by contrast loved the Torah (in Vulgate/MT form) and even defended it. He was accused of more of Christianising than of anything else, though. Perhaps because he did, in fact, use a Latin basis over Hebrew (plenty of Arab-speaking Jews existed, using their own translations). But also he may have accepted Original Sin from Adam, which other Muslim Sunnis deny.

Another Phaethon

One Patrick M. Shober has reported a cluster of meteors. He argues the same clustering-effect happens with the Geminids. The Geminids have a source: 3200 Phaéthon. So a different - but similar - nearEarth asteroid has delivered this set of meteors.

This sort of rock behaves more like a comet. Shober's parent body is probably a C like Phaéthon, or Bennu.

The next project, Shober leaves to others: to get 'scope time for the hunt for this now-invisible asteroid.

Enamel

Denisova 3 - and Harbin / longi - has been called out as containing a "super archaic" introgression. It had been suspected from Erectus if circumstantially. More circumstantial evidence came in a couple days back. Here's a release mostly from Kirsty Penkman of York; here's the article from China.

This is from proteins, such as Linus Pauling might have approved; not full DNA. These teeth are simply too old and rare to risk mulching for DNA, as we might for Neanders and Denisovans which are everywhere now. One protein is AMBN-M273V found in the tooth-enamel. And in some (mostly later) Denisovan DNA; but not in the rest of us. Another is AMBN-253G which isn't anywhere else, so is now available to tag a tooth as specific to Erectus.

The Neanders perhaps never met any Erectus, as the post-split Denisovans met-n'-matched them. Erectus seems met in southeast Asia, preEemian, maybe when it was Sundaland.

As a humble protein-set rather than DNA, this thesis remains circumstantial: evidence, but not "proof". One reviewer, Massilani, points out that parallel mutations be possible. But: how come these mutations outside Erectus be so rare (M273V) or nonexistent (253G)? Penkman asks similar questions.

The Beja of old

I saw this one yesterday but was flat too exhausted - I blame altitude sickness - to post anything of it. So I'll try tonight.

These are mass graves in the strip of Sahara east of the Nile, 4000-3000 BCE extending into the third millennium, so overlapping the upper-Egyptian kingdom... in time (we'll get to space and people). The report comes from Atbai in modern Sudan. This abuts the southeast Egyptian coast. I expect similar ruins exist in that side of Egypt as well.

That region was Blemmyes in antiquity; the reaches of the Cushitic language Beja today. Since Browne in 2003 most scholars believe Beja - which is simply "Beduin" adapted to the language - evolved from Blemmyan. The Nubians seem not to have mingled with them much by contrast with Egyptians and, lately, Arabs.

The Red/Erythraean sea maintained links with the Egypt of the Pyramids, of "Red Sea Scrolls" fame. I don't know that any Beja vocabulary appears in those scrolls. It may be too far north for our purpose. There's talk the Egyptians first took note of the Blemmyes in the later Ramesside era or under Sheshonq, because - as with Qeheq - someone then uses a Beja word to open a prayer. The earlier Egyptian pharaohs cared about Nubia, who owned a viable state of their own; but ignored the nomads, who did not and do not.

The article notes that the old desert herdsmen, who assuredly behaved there like the Beja behave today, evolved an elite class. But was it a Cushitic or a Nubian class?