When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species

in Architecture, Biology, History | December 7th, 2021

The Colos­se­um is one of the most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions in Italy, and thus one of the most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many vis­i­tors has changed over the cen­turies. In the Atlantic, nov­el­ist and pod­cast­er Paul Coop­er notes that, “the belief that Chris­t­ian mar­tyrs had once been fed to the lions in the are­na,” for exam­ple, once made it a renowned site of reli­gious pil­grim­age. (This “despite lit­tle evi­dence that Chris­tians were ever actu­al­ly killed in the are­na.”) But in that same era, the Colos­se­um was also a site of botan­ic pil­grim­age: amid its ruins grew “420 species of plant,” includ­ing some rare exam­ples “found nowhere else in Europe.”

Notable tourists who took note of the Colos­se­um’s rich plant life include Charles Dick­ens, who beheld its “walls and arch­es over­grown with green,” and Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley, who wrote of how “the copse­wood over­shad­ows you as you wan­der through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this cli­mate of flow­ers bloom under your feet.”

Coop­er quotes from these writ­ings in his Atlantic piece, and in an asso­ci­at­ed Twit­ter thread also includes plen­ty of ren­der­ings of the Colos­se­um as it then looked dur­ing the 18th and 19th cen­turies. He even select­ed images from Flo­ra of the Colos­se­um of Rome, or, Illus­tra­tions and descrip­tions of four hun­dred and twen­ty plants grow­ing spon­ta­neous­ly upon the ruins of the Colos­se­um of Rome (read­able free online at the Inter­net Archive), the 1855 work of a less well-known Eng­lish­man named Richard Deakin.

A botanist, Deakin did the hard work of cat­a­loging those hun­dreds of plant species grow­ing in the Colos­se­um back in the 1850s. The inter­ven­ing 170 or so years have tak­en their toll on this bio­di­ver­si­ty: as Nature report­ed it, only 242 of these species were still present in the ear­ly 2000s, due in part to “a shift towards species that pre­fer a warmer, dri­er cli­mate” and the growth of the sur­round­ing city. In its hey­day in the first cen­turies of the last mil­len­ni­um, the are­na lay on the out­skirts of Rome, where­as it feels cen­tral today. Pay it a vis­it, and you both will and will not see the Colos­se­um that Dick­ens and Shel­ley did; but then, they nev­er knew it as, say, Titus or Domit­ian did. In recent years there have been moves to restore and even improve ancient fea­tures like the retractable floor; why not dou­ble down on the exot­ic flo­ra while we’re at it?

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

The Roman Colos­se­um Has a Twin in Tunisia: Dis­cov­er the Amphithe­ater of El Jem, One of the Best-Pre­served Roman Ruins in the World

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colos­se­um Is the Largest Lego Set Ever

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Pink Floyd’s Entire Studio Discography is Now on YouTube: Stream the Studio & Live Albums

in Music | December 6th, 2021

Approached with lit­tle pri­or knowl­edge, Pink Floyd is an enig­ma. A sta­di­um rock band renowned for mas­sive laser light shows and a pio­neer­ing use of quadra­phon­ic and holo­phon­ic sound, they are also best appre­ci­at­ed at home — alone or with a few true fans — on a pair of high fideli­ty stereo speak­ers or head­phones, under the hazy pur­plish-green­ish glow of a black­light poster. The expe­ri­ence of their clas­sic albums is para­dox­i­cal­ly one of “shared soli­tary con­tem­pla­tion”; their live shows are an expan­sion of the home lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ment, where fans first received an “edu­ca­tion from cousins and old­er broth­ers of friends as to the seri­ous­ness (and ston­er sacra­ment) of The Dark Side of the Moon,” as Mar­tin Popoff writes in Pink Floyd: Album by Album. Both enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar and dar­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal, it’s hard to place them com­fort­ably in one camp or anoth­er.

Lis­ten­ers who came to the band dur­ing their 1970s hey­day, “in the years between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Final Cut,” Bill Kopp writes, “were large­ly unaware of what the band had done before the peri­od….. The fact high­lights a remark­able fea­ture of Pink Floyd’s pop­u­lar­i­ty: casu­al fans knew of the band’s work from The Dark Side of the Moon onward; more seri­ous stu­dents of the group were famil­iar with the band’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, made when Pink Floyd was led by its founder, Roger Kei­th ‘Syd’ Bar­rett.”

The split is curi­ous because the 70s space rock ver­sion of the band who made the third best-sell­ing album of all time owed so much to its psy­che­del­ic founder, who slipped com­plete­ly from view as he slipped away from the music indus­try.

As Andy Mab­bett writes in his book Pink Floyd: The Music and the Mys­tery:

Barrett’s with­draw­al from music had long ago become a source of intrigue, one of the most mys­ti­fy­ing sagas in rock, but his con­tri­bu­tion to the group as their first singer, gui­tarist and song­writer was cru­cial to there ever being a Pink Floyd in the first place. Syd might not have played much of a role in the clas­sic record­ings Pink Floyd pro­duced in the Sev­en­ties, but every­one — not least the group them­selves — long ago real­ized that all this might nev­er have hap­pened were it not for Syd’s ini­tial inspi­ra­tion.

At their best, dur­ing the gold­en years of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here, the band remem­bered their his­to­ry while expand­ing their ear­ly avant-blues rock into the out­er reach­es of space. Dark Side con­tained their first hit sin­gles since their 1967 debut and intro­duced new fans to Bar­rett indi­rect­ly via the lyrics of “Brain Dam­age” (orig­i­nal­ly called “Lunatic”) and the “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” suite. The cyn­i­cism and sense of doom that seemed to take over as Roger Waters became the band’s pri­ma­ry song­writer found its foil in Bar­ret­t’s con­tin­ued influ­ence — in his absence — on the band dur­ing the ear­ly 70s.

But in the 70s one had to work par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to get caught up on the ear­ly mythos of Pink Floyd, track­ing down LPs of albums like Med­dle, Atom Heart Moth­er, and Ummagum­ma. As ear­ly albums were reis­sued on tape and CD, it became a lit­tle eas­i­er to famil­iar­ize one­self with Pink Floy­d’s many his­tor­i­cal phas­es — from exper­i­men­tal psych-rock pio­neers to sta­di­um-fill­ing prog-rock super­stars. These days, that expe­ri­ence can be had in an after­noon on YouTube. The band has put their stu­dio discog­ra­phy and three live per­for­mances online and you can find links below (with a few choice cuts above).

Stu­dio

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

A Saucer­ful of Secrets

More

Ummagum­ma

Atom Heart Moth­er

Med­dle

Obscured by Clouds

The Dark Side of the Moon

Wish You Were Here

Ani­mals

The Wall

The Final Cut

A Momen­tary Lapse of Rea­son

The Divi­sion Bell

The End­less Riv­er

Live

Del­i­cate Sound of Thun­der

Pulse

Is There Any­body Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 

Does the ridicu­lous ease of find­ing this music now clear up the enig­ma of Pink Floyd? Maybe. Or maybe no amount of stream­ing con­ve­nience will dis­pel “the mys­tery,” Mab­bett writes, “that grew around their reluc­tance to be pho­tographed or inter­viewed for much of the Sev­en­ties, the lack of sin­gles dur­ing the same cru­cial peri­od, the imag­i­na­tive album pack­ag­ing, the crisp live sound, the spec­tac­u­lar the­atri­cal shows — and, of course, a spe­cial mag­ic that can­not be copied no mat­ter how much mon­ey or equip­ment is avail­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

A Live Stu­dio Cov­er of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Fin­ish

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Quirky Self-Portraits of 18th Century Painter Joseph Ducreux

in Art | December 6th, 2021

We all know him, the dap­per cross between a smarmy office bro and smug, pull-my-fin­ger uncle; lean­ing on his walk­ing stick, hat pushed back at a rak­ish angle, point­ing at the view­er with a leer.… The 18th-cen­tu­ry paint­ing, titled Self-Por­trait in the Guise of a Mock­er, enjoyed a brief but rich sec­ond life for a cou­ple years as a 21st cen­tu­ry meme, first appear­ing online in a 2009 image macro with the cap­tion “Dis­re­gard Females, Acquire Cur­ren­cy,” an over­ly stuffy, thus hilar­i­ous, rephras­ing of Noto­ri­ous B.I.G.’s “Get Mon­ey” lyrics. Thou­sands of imi­ta­tions fol­lowed. With­in a cou­ple years, Steve Buscemi’s face got pho­to­shopped in place of the grin­ning bon vivant, and the meme began its decline.

But whose face was it, pre-Busce­mi, giv­ing us that toothy grin and point, “like a man catch­ing sight of an old friend across a crowd­ed room,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, “or a politi­cian try­ing to charm a vot­er.” The gen­tle­man in ques­tion, in fact, hap­pened to be the artist, Joseph Ducreux, a high­ly skilled oil painter whose minia­ture of Marie Antoinette in 1769 won him a baronet­cy and the title of primer pein­tre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen).

This was an hon­or not giv­en to any old slouch. Ducreux worked along­side such mas­ters as Élis­a­beth Vigée Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, despite the fact that he was not a mem­ber of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Paint­ing and Sculp­ture, unheard of at the time for a court painter.

Dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, Ducreux hid out in Lon­don, where he made the last por­trait of Louis XVI before the king’s behead­ing. After­ward, he returned and, through his friend­ship with David, resumed his career as a por­trait painter, as well as an eccen­tric self-por­traitist, an avo­ca­tion he’d tak­en up in the 1780s and 90s to sat­is­fy his curios­i­ty about the the­o­ry of phys­iog­no­my, a pseu­do­science that attempt­ed to divine a per­son­’s char­ac­ter and per­son­al­i­ty from their facial expres­sions and bod­i­ly pos­tures.

These were remark­able paint­ings for their time, but they were not made with Tum­blr or Twit­ter in mind. Giv­en that they were made before the age of pho­tog­ra­phy and paint­ed on large can­vas­es in oils, the process of cre­at­ing these goofy self­ies would have been painstak­ing and time-con­sum­ing — hard­ly the kind of effort a work­ing artist applies to a joke.

Humor­ous as they are, and no doubt Ducreux had a healthy sense of humor, the por­traits were also meant to serve a sci­en­tif­ic pur­pose of a sort, and they show an artist push­ing past the con­ser­v­a­tive tra­di­tions of por­trai­ture in his day, chaf­ing at the sedate roy­al pos­tures and placid expres­sions that were sup­posed to tele­graph the aris­toc­ra­cy’s inner nobil­i­ty. We might sus­pect that through­out his career as a court painter, Ducreux him­self had rea­sons to sus­pect oth­er­wise about his sub­jects. But he only had per­mis­sion to prac­tice his the­o­ries on him­self.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

Vin­cent Van Gogh’s Self Por­traits: Explore & Down­load a Col­lec­tion of 17 Paint­ings Free Online

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Peter Jackson Used Artificial Intelligence to Restore the Video & Audio Featured in The Beatles: Get Back

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Music, Technology | December 6th, 2021

Much has been made in recent years of the “de-aging” process­es that allow actors to cred­i­bly play char­ac­ters far younger than them­selves. But it has also become pos­si­ble to de-age film itself, as demon­strat­ed by Peter Jack­son’s cel­e­brat­ed new docu-series The Bea­t­les: Get Back. The vast major­i­ty of the mate­r­i­al that com­pris­es its near­ly eight-hour run­time was orig­i­nal­ly shot in 1969, under the direc­tion of Michael Lind­say-Hogg for the doc­u­men­tary that became Let It Be.

Those who have seen both Lin­day-Hog­g’s and Jack­son’s doc­u­men­taries will notice how much sharp­er, smoother, and more vivid the very same footage looks in the lat­ter, despite the six­teen-mil­lime­ter film hav­ing lan­guished for half a cen­tu­ry. The kind of visu­al restora­tion and enhance­ment seen in Get Back was made pos­si­ble by tech­nolo­gies that have only emerged in the past few decades — and pre­vi­ous­ly seen in Jack­son’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a doc­u­men­tary acclaimed for its restora­tion of cen­tu­ry-old World War I footage to a time-trav­el-like degree of verisimil­i­tude.

“You can’t actu­al­ly just do it with off-the-shelf soft­ware,” Jack­son explained in an inter­view about the restora­tion process­es involved in They Shall Not Grow Old. This neces­si­tat­ed mar­shal­ing, at his New Zealand com­pa­ny Park Road Post Pro­duc­tion, “a depart­ment of code writ­ers who write com­put­er code in soft­ware.” In oth­er words, a suf­fi­cient­ly ambi­tious project of visu­al revi­tal­iza­tion — mak­ing media from bygone times even more life­like than it was to begin with — becomes as much a job of tra­di­tion­al film-restora­tion or visu­al-effects as of com­put­er pro­gram­ming.

This also goes for the less obvi­ous but no-less-impres­sive treat­ment giv­en by Jack­son and his team to the audio that came with the Let It Be footage. Record­ed in large part monau­ral­ly, these tapes pre­sent­ed a for­mi­da­ble pro­duc­tion chal­lenge. John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s instru­ments share a sin­gle track with their voic­es — and not just their singing voic­es, but their speak­ing ones as well. On first lis­ten, this ren­ders many of their con­ver­sa­tions inaudi­ble, and prob­a­bly by design: “If they were in a con­ver­sa­tion,” said Jack­son, they would turn their amps up loud and they’d strum the gui­tar.”

This means of keep­ing their words from Lind­say-Hogg and his crew worked well enough in the whol­ly ana­log late 1960s, but it has proven no match for the arti­fi­cial intelligence/machine learn­ing of the 2020s. “We devised a tech­nol­o­gy that is called demix­ing,” said Jack­son. “You teach the com­put­er what a gui­tar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like.” Sup­plied with enough son­ic data, the sys­tem even­tu­al­ly learned to dis­tin­guish from one anoth­er not just the sounds of the Bea­t­les’ instru­ments but of their voic­es as well.

Hence, in addi­tion to Get Back’s rev­e­la­to­ry musi­cal moments, its many once-pri­vate but now crisply audi­ble exchanges between the Fab Four. “Oh, you’re record­ing our con­ver­sa­tion?” George Har­ri­son at one point asks Lind­say-Hogg in a char­ac­ter­is­tic tone of faux sur­prise. But if he could hear the record­ings today, his sur­prise would sure­ly be real.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Paul McCart­ney Com­pose The Bea­t­les Clas­sic “Get Back” Out of Thin Air (1969)

Peter Jack­son Gives Us an Entic­ing Glimpse of His Upcom­ing Bea­t­les Doc­u­men­tary The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Lennon or McCart­ney? Sci­en­tists Use Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Fig­ure Out Who Wrote Icon­ic Bea­t­les Songs

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” to Celebrate Hannukah: Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

in Music | December 4th, 2021

As men­tioned ear­li­er this week, Foo Fight­ers front­man Dave Grohl and pro­duc­er Greg Kurstin have launched The Hanukkah Ses­sions, a fes­tive music series where they cov­er a song–one for each night of Hanukkah–originally cre­at­ed by a Jew­ish musi­cian. Above, watch them pay trib­ute to two nice Jew­ish boys from Queens named Jef­fery Hyman and Thomas Erde­lyi, aka the great Joey and Tom­my Ramone. Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cov­er Van Halen’s “Jump,” Cel­e­brat­ing David Lee Roth, One of the Hard­est Rock­ing Jews, on the Fourth Night of Han­nukah

Talk­ing Heads Per­form The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Togeth­er)

The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974)

The Ramones Play New Year’s Eve Con­cert in Lon­don, 1977

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Behold the Glass Armonica, the Unbelievably Fragile Instrument Invented by Benjamin Franklin

in History, Music | December 3rd, 2021

We’re all famil­iar with key­board instru­ments. Many of us have also heard (or indeed made) music, of a kind, with the rims of wine glass­es. But to unite the two required the tru­ly Amer­i­can com­bi­na­tion of genius, where­with­al, and pen­chant for fol­ly found in one his­tor­i­cal fig­ure above all: Ben­jamin Franklin. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed here on Open Cul­ture, the musi­cal­ly inclined Franklin invent­ed an instru­ment called the glass armon­i­ca (alter­na­tive­ly “glass har­mon­i­ca”) — or rather he re-invent­ed it, hav­ing seen and heard an ear­ly exam­ple played in Lon­don. Essen­tial­ly a series of dif­fer­ent­ly sized bowls arranged from large to small, all rotat­ing on a shaft, the glass armon­i­ca allows its play­er to make poly­phon­ic music of a down­right celes­tial nature.

The play­ing, how­ev­er, is eas­i­er writ­ten about than done. You can see that for your­self in the video above, in which gui­tarist Rob Scal­lon vis­its musi­cian-preser­va­tion­ist Den­nis James. Not only does James play a glass armon­i­ca, he plays a glass armon­i­ca he built him­self — and has pre­sum­ably rebuilt a few times as well, giv­en its scarce­ly believ­able fragili­ty.

Trans­porta­tion presents its chal­lenges, but so does the act of play­ing, which requires a rou­tine of hand-wash­ing (and sub­se­quent re-wet­ting, with dis­tilled water only) that even the coro­n­avirus has­n’t got most of us used to. But even in the hands of a first-timer like Scal­lon, who makes sure to take his turn at the key­board-of-bowls, the glass armon­i­ca sounds like no oth­er instru­ment even most of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry have heard. In the hands of one of its few liv­ing vir­tu­osos, of course, the glass armon­i­ca is some­thing else entire­ly.

“If this piece did­n’t exist,” says James, hold­ing a piece of sheet music, “I would­n’t be sit­ting here.” He refers to Ada­gio & Ron­do for glass armon­i­ca in C minor (KV 617), com­posed by none oth­er than Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart. “In 1791, the last year of his life, Mozart wrote a piece for the Ger­man armon­i­ca play­er, Mar­i­anne Kirchgäss­ner,” writes Tim­o­ty Judd at The Lis­ten­ers’ Club. Like every glass armon­i­ca piece, accord­ing to James, one ends it by drop­ping sud­den­ly into com­plete silence: “It’s the only instru­ment, up until that point, that could to that: die away to absolute­ly noth­ing.” Alas, writes James, not long after the debut of Mozart’s com­po­si­tion rumors cir­cu­lat­ed that “the strange, crys­talline tones of Ben­jamin Franklin’s new instru­ment were a threat to pub­lic health.” A shame though that seems today, it does suit the mul­ti­tal­ent­ed Franklin’s ancil­lary rep­u­ta­tion as an invet­er­ate trou­ble­mak­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Instru­ment Ben­jamin Franklin Invent­ed, the Glass Armon­i­ca, Plays Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sug­ar Plum Fairy”

Hear the Cristal Baschet, an Enchant­i­ng Organ Made of Wood, Met­al & Glass, and Played with Wet Hands

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Catherine the Great of Russia Sends a Letter Urging Her Fellow Russians to Get Inoculated Against Smallpox (1787)

in History, Science | December 3rd, 2021

I got my boost­er shot the oth­er week and through the mir­a­cles of mod­ern sci­ence I bare­ly knew a nee­dle was in me before the phar­ma­cist told me it was over. (I also didn’t feel any after effects, but your mileage may vary.) I men­tion this because before nee­dles, before injectable vac­cines, there was some­thing called var­i­o­la­tion.

Since ancient times, small­pox had a habit of dec­i­mat­ing pop­u­la­tions, dis­ap­pear­ing, and reap­pear­ing else­where for anoth­er out­break. It killed rulers and peas­ants alike. Symp­toms includ­ed fever, vom­it­ing, and most abhor­rent, a body cov­ered with flu­id-filled blis­ters. It could blind you, and it could kill you. In var­i­o­la­tion, a physi­cian would take the infec­tious flu­id from from a blis­ter or scab on an infect­ed per­son and rub it into scratch­es or cuts on a healthy patient’s skin. This would lead to a mild—but still par­tic­u­lar­ly unpleasant—case of small­pox, and inoc­u­late them against the virus.

But one can also see how the prac­tice of variolation—introducing a dilut­ed ver­sion of the virus in order for the immune sys­tem to do its work—points towards the sci­ence of vac­cines.

One sup­port­er of var­i­o­la­tion was Cather­ine the Great, as evi­denced by a let­ter in her hand pro­mot­ing it across Rus­sia from 1787. The let­ter just sold for $1.3 mil­lion, along­side a por­trait of the monarch by Dmit­ry Lev­it­sky.

Addressed to a gov­er­nor-gen­er­al, Cather­ine the Great instructs him to make var­i­o­la­tion avail­able to every­body in his province.

“Among the oth­er duties of the Wel­fare Boards in the Provinces entrust­ed to you,” she writes, “one of the most impor­tant should be the intro­duc­tion of inoc­u­la­tion against small­pox, which, as we know, caus­es great harm, espe­cial­ly among the ordi­nary peo­ple.” She fur­ther orders inoc­u­la­tion cen­ters be set up in con­vents and monas­ter­ies, fund­ed by town rev­enues to pay doc­tors.

Cather­ine had a per­son­al stake in all this. Her hus­band, Peter III caught the dis­ease before he became emper­or, and was left dis­fig­ured and scarred for life. When she got a chance to inoc­u­late her­self in 1768 she took it, call­ing in a Scot­tish doc­tor, Dr. Thomas Dims­dale, to per­form the var­i­o­la­tion. The pro­ce­dure took place in secret, with a horse at the ready in case the pro­ce­dure caused ter­ri­ble side effects and he had to hot foot it out of Rus­sia. That didn’t hap­pen, and after a brief con­va­les­cence, Cather­ine revealed what she had done to her coun­try­men.

“My objec­tive was, through my exam­ple, to save from death the mul­ti­tude of my sub­jects who, not know­ing the val­ue of this tech­nique, and fright­ened of it, were left in dan­ger.”

Yet, despite her own brav­ery, 20 years lat­er small­pox con­tin­ued to ram­page through Rus­sia, hence the let­ter.

Nine years lat­er in 1796, Dr. Edward Jen­ner found that the cow­pox virus—which only caused mild, cold-like symp­toms in humans—could inoc­u­late humans against small­pox. Despite ini­tial rejec­tions from the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, his dis­cov­ery led to vac­ci­na­tion sup­plant­i­ng var­i­o­la­tion. And it’s the rea­son we now use the word “vaccine”—it comes from the Latin word for cow.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s First Anti-Vax Move­ment Start­ed with the First Vac­cine for Small­pox in 1796, and Spread Fears of Peo­ple Get­ting Turned into Half-Cow Babies

How Vac­cines Improved Our World In One Graph­ic

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Archaeologists Discover 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Footprints That Could Be the World’s Earliest Cave Art

in Art, Creativity, Life, Science | December 3rd, 2021

Wet cement trig­gers a pri­mal impulse, par­tic­u­lar­ly in chil­dren.

It’s so tempt­ing to inscribe a pris­tine patch of side­walk with a last­ing impres­sion of one’s exis­tence.

Is the coast clear? Yes? Quick, grab a stick and write your name!

No stick?

Sink a hand or foot in, like a movie star…

…or, even more thrilling­ly, a child hominin on the High Tibetan Plateau, 169,000 to 226,000 years ago!

Per­haps one day your sur­face-mar­ring ges­ture will be con­ceived of as a great gift to sci­ence, and pos­si­bly art. (Try this line of rea­son­ing with the angry home­own­er or shop­keep­er who’s intent on mea­sur­ing your hand against the one now per­ma­nent­ly set into their new cement walk­way.)

Tell them how in 2018, pro­fes­sion­al ich­nol­o­gists doing field­work in Que­sang Hot Spring, some 80 km north­west of Lhasa, were over the moon to find five hand­prints and five foot­prints dat­ing to the Mid­dle Pleis­tocene near the base of a rocky promon­to­ry.

Researchers led by David Zhang of Guangzhou Uni­ver­si­ty attribute the hand­prints to a 12-year-old, and the foot­prints to a 7‑year-old.

In a recent arti­cle in Sci­ence Bul­letin, Zhang and his team con­clude that the children’s hand­i­work is not only delib­er­ate (as opposed to “imprint­ed dur­ing nor­mal loco­mo­tion or by the use of hands to sta­bi­lize motion”) but also “an ear­ly act of pari­etal art.”

The Ura­ni­um dat­ing of the traver­tine which received the kids’ hands and feet while still soft is grounds for excite­ment, mov­ing the dial on the ear­li­est known occu­pa­tion (or vis­i­ta­tion) of the Tibetan Plateau much fur­ther back than pre­vi­ous­ly believed — from 90,000–120,000 years ago to 169,000–226,000 years ago.

That’s a lot of food for thought, evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly speak­ing. As Zhang told TIME mag­a­zine, “you’re simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deal­ing with a harsh envi­ron­ment, less oxy­gen, and at the same time, cre­at­ing this.”

Zhang is stead­fast that “this” is the world’s old­est pari­etal art — out­pac­ing a Nean­derthal artist’s red-pig­ment­ed hand sten­cil in Spain’s Cave of Mal­travieso by more than 100,000 years.

Oth­er sci­en­tists are not so sure.

Anthro­pol­o­gist Paul Taçon, direc­tor of Grif­fith University’s Place, Evo­lu­tion and Rock Art Her­itage Unit, thinks it’s too big of “a stretch” to describe the impres­sions as art, sug­gest­ing that they could be chalked up to a range of activ­i­ties.

Nick Bar­ton, Pro­fes­sor of Pale­olith­ic Arche­ol­o­gy at Oxford won­ders if the traces, inten­tion­al­ly placed though they may be, are less art than child’s play. (Team Wet Cement!)

Zhang coun­ters that such argu­ments are pred­i­cat­ed on mod­ern notions of what con­sti­tutes art, dri­ving his point home with an appro­pri­ate­ly stone-aged metaphor:

When you use stone tools to dig some­thing in the present day, we can­not say that that is tech­nol­o­gy. But if ancient peo­ple use that, that’s tech­nol­o­gy.

Cor­nell University’s Thomas Urban, who co-authored the Sci­ence Bul­letin arti­cle with Zhang and a host of oth­er researchers shares his col­leagues aver­sion’ to def­i­n­i­tions shaped by a mod­ern lens:

Dif­fer­ent camps have spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tions of art that pri­or­i­tize var­i­ous cri­te­ria, but I would like to tran­scend that and say there can be lim­i­ta­tions imposed by these strict cat­e­gories that might inhib­it us from think­ing more broad­ly about cre­ative behav­ior. I think we can make a sol­id case that this is not util­i­tar­i­an behav­ior. There’s some­thing play­ful, cre­ative, pos­si­bly sym­bol­ic about this. This gets at a very fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of what it actu­al­ly means to be human.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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