After 15000 BC in Venice

The news today comes from Eurogenes: Villabruna but pre-IndoEuropean. This new finding is from the latest Pleistocene, first half of the 15th millennium BC. The region is Riparo Tagliente around Venice. "Epigravettian" which means, here, post- [UPDATE 5/5/22 east]. This guy's peeps had run the Gravettian peeps off the Adriatic.

The paper is Bartolini et al., "Early Alpine occupation backdates westward human migration in Late Glacial Europe". His mother was in the U4'9 clade, related to "Ursula" (but not "Katrine") of the Daughters of Eve. Father was I2 like, er, that Austrian guy.

As Davidski notes, this isn't the J type male or (other) J type female typical of the Neolithic Farmer. (Not Aryan neither but that goes wi'out sayin', dunnit.) Bartolini thinks he got here from the Balkans which then, note, was an extension of Anatolia. The seas were lower then.

R homeland

The "R" Y-chromosome featured in Mal'ta Boy, in Siberia. R1 is ancestor to Indo-Europeans... and to North Americans. Already at the beginning of our Holocene, R1a had split off in the Russias. I sometimes slip up and consider R1b, R2b. So: how about those other R's?

R2 clusters in Central Asia and Pakistan. These regions also have the miscellaneous R*, Mal'ta aside. Also during ice ages I expect populations to stick with the warmer, more-sheltered regions.

At a guess, Mal'ta was peripheral to R's Pleistocene homeland. That homeland was the greater northern Iran between the Caspian and the Aral. The domestication of the dog and [UPDATE 1/25/21: then] Solutrean technology (from the Catalan coast) allowed R1 to expand permanently into the Baltic (R1a), the Danube (R1b) and Siberia (R1-Bering). Meanwhile R2 and the rest stayed home.

The victory of Paris

Last April I got directed to Robespierre and his immediate memory in Directory France. It occurred to me that for all my reading on Catharism and French Catholicism, I had only a junior-high understanding of the Revolution. I bought Simon Schama's Citizens I think that very month and then I, er, failed to read it.

A family-member beat me to it. So I've been catching up, June and July. I am toward the end: the Committee of Public Safety has centralised the government (Schama sees Saint-Just as the Lenin of this régime), and quelled the federalist and royalist rebellions. Robespierre is still a relative moderate, a Jeffersonian Deist where the others - in their madness - are worshipping reified Classical Roman ideals.

Schama had to argue the Vendée case, which modern historians now accept. Every now and then Schama does pause his narrative to settle modern scholarly scores. I am un-fond of such excursions. I suppose in the 1980s writers didn't know better.

One facet which intrigues me here is how disorganised was the opposition. It seems not to have occurred to the Jacobins' many enemies that they stood a better chance if they united. The Vendée wasted its effort on a siege of Nantes. Nantes itself seems like it had little love for the Revolution, given how hard the Parisians purged it. But the Girondins, who became federalists contra Paris, stubbornly held that they were still republicans and secularists. Those Vendée reactionaries were Not Their Sort.

Paris suffered her own divisions. But once the anti-Jacobins had arrayed themselves against Paris, first among the royalists and then among the Girondins, Paris united behind the most cohesively pro-Paris party. That party was Jacobin.

Given all that, the counter-Revolution needed to define itself as non-Parisian. From that, it needed to unite its provinces. Given that Ludvig von Fresen was already King Louis XVII of the Vendée in spirit (and, more to the point, on their assignat currency), a federalist constitutional-monarchy on the Habsburg model seems a natural compromise. The counter-revolution also needed a man to head it - it needed a Franco. It didn't ever get one. General Dumouriez might have become one, given five more months, but short-term he was compromised by tacit Prusso-Austrian support, and couldn't get near the capital.

That leads to another problem: that foreigners were attacking the frontiers at the time. The Jacobins, holding the capital, could pose as the patriots whilst the provinces were Endangering The Patrie. When the patriots started winning those battles in the east, the rebellions west and south were left, like Dumouriez, compromised. I suppose if the Prussians and Austrians afield had enjoyed better logistical support, the Revolution would have ended up like the Paris Commune in 1871. But Bismarck wasn't born yet.

The Revolution had to implode by itself, first. Only much later, could Napoleon step in.

UPDATE 10/31/21: What everyone suspected of "Louis XVII" is probably true.

Helicopters over Venus

Let's consider the helicopter: what it is for. We'll start with sanity-check type stuff before we get into the maths.

Helicopters take cargo from the surface and move it over short distances, close to land, in high-pressure atmosphere without much wind. They also can hover. The basic summary is that they hover no higher than 3 km, although they can fly 8 km. If they are close to ground - that is, on a mountain - they are able to do some hovering higher than 3 km. Also, over Mars (h/t Reynolds).

Over Venus, I am not seeing clearly where we'd want a helicopter in its Marslike altitudes. Maybe the poles. Where we got balloons for that. (UPDATE 5/20/23: maybe both?)

Further down, the headwinds get serious. Here too I see little point in a 'copter to carry freight above the clouds. In the cloud (= farm) layers we have Earth sealevel airpressures and (relatively) sedate moving-targets. But I doubt that the floating balloons want furiously-spinning blades in the ambient fog.

I think the helicopter comes into its own, as on Earth, at the surface. UPDATE 8/9 PM: It can also assist hoisting the heavier, industrial bubbles.

The laws of nations between religions

OnePeterFive offers Andrew Latham's reading-list of international theory in Christendom. It starts with Augustine, back in Latin Late Antiquity. Then the mediaevals: John of Paris, Aquinas, Dante, and Pierre Dubois [the Scholastic].

I pointed out there that Machiavelli's antecedent was none of these. To understand Ol' Nicky, you must go to the North African tradition, of Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun (pdf) had abandoned Greek political theory and compiled a theory of his own, on pure power-politics. He owed nothing to the Latin tradition of course... but he also shows overt scorn for the Arabic tradition. Nicky just takes Ibn Khaldun's theory, and swaps its Islamic(ate) examples for European Classical and Italian examples.

(As we see in Iran today, Islamic republicans have leaned upon Plato. This was true in mediaeval Islam as well.)

A question we might have is, how come Islam has relied so little on Christian thought. I'd propose, as paradox, precisely because Islam is so Christian at base. But not Latin; 'tis Byzantine, and Miaphysite (the Orient had some Sasaniana in there as well). Islam was religiously idealist, holding onto tropes of an ultimate imperium. And they didn't own much access to Latin.

It may be that Dante owes his monarchical theory to the same Last Empire ideal. Although he'd never admit to owing anything to Islam, as Nicky would owe to one particular Muslim.

La Bouchet East

Hubisz, Williams, and Siepel in their sea of percentages notes that Denisovans were 1% paraHuman. The trio date these strands to about the same time and presume about the same event, with about the same counterparty. Likely Homo Erectus.

We don't directly have the Erectus genome. The three just know he met some sort of Denisovan. Stephanie Pappas writes, a million years ago when the Denisovans... didn't yet exist. The actual paper is more clear about "divergence time" and "migration time"; the million year span refers to t_div. t_mig - when Sup>Den happened - was after 225 kya. If we were to go look, Sulawesi looks promising.

Of course 225 kya falls into the same La Bouchet when Sundaland was subject to flooding. While Neanders were enjoying themselves west, paraDenisova got in on it east.

La Bouchet West

Last night the online geneticists linked to Stephanie Pappas among others. (Apparently Melissa J. Hubisz, Amy L. Williams, and Adam Siepel had hacked Excel.)

This constrains papers from back to 2013 on the various intermixings between Neander up to Vindija, scattered Denisovae, various versions of human, and Homo Erectus. Neander DNA is well-constrained by now, such that we can find it easily in our own genomes. 25% of the whole thing (Vindija clan) can be reconstructed from its scattered remnants.

Here we learn that early humans had mixed with Neanders 300-200 kya: they left that in the Neander genome. There's a limit to what may be found directly without direct DNA. The mix overlaps La Bouchet 240-230 kya - a sort of Indian Summer in the Pleistocene, sharply broken by a freeze before it could really get going. The initial warmth would have enticed some Africans, out; the freeze would have run them back home. Except for the hybrids, left in Eurasia.

This latest article doesn't talk about the later Eemian migrations when hybrids did trickle into Africa.

These first humans and the Neanders who lerrrved them left some remains in Greece (210 kya) and Israel (180 kya). They didn't get further east; they left no trace among the Denisovans.