The Military Adventures of Alexander the Great: An Animated Documentary Shows How He Conquered Most of the Known World (336–323 BC)

in History | March 1st, 2023

To learn about his­to­ry is to learn about war, or so it can feel when you go far back enough in time. And in any era of antiq­ui­ty, few could have matched Alexan­der the Great’s mas­tery of that art. After becom­ing kind of the Mace­don in 336 BC, at the age of 20, he spent a decade con­quer­ing oth­er lands in order to build a vast empire stretch­ing from Greece to India. How he man­aged to pull it off is the sub­ject of the near­ly hour-long Epic His­to­ry TV video above, which traces Alexan­der’s life and reign over ever-vaster swathes of the then-known world.

Re-cre­at­ing all the bat­tles of Alexan­der’s con­quest with not just maps but 3D ani­ma­tion as well, the pro­duc­tion makes clear­ly leg­i­ble the kind of vio­lent con­flicts that, no doubt chaot­ic when expe­ri­enced on the bat­tle­field, can also be dif­fi­cult to fol­low in the pages of a text­book.

Its graph­ics and nar­ra­tion break down every­thing from how Alexan­der ini­tial­ly arranged his troops to how he respond­ed, blow by blow, to the moves of ene­my forces. All of it added up to a mil­i­tary strat­e­gy that kept Alexan­der unde­feat­ed in bat­tle despite often hav­ing been out­num­bered, and whose details are still stud­ied today.

By his mid-twen­ties, Alexan­der had con­quered the once-mighty Per­sian Empire. But with the ambi­tion befit­ting a vic­to­ri­ous young man — not to men­tion one who’d been tutored by Aris­to­tle him­self — he would set­tle for noth­ing less than rul­ing the world, or at least the world as a Greek in the fourth cen­tu­ry BC would have con­ceived of it, and he man­aged to get quite close to that goal before his death at the age of 32. That he was felled by an ill­ness rather than in war is one of his­to­ry’s great ironies, giv­en that he’d per­son­al­ly led his troops into all their bat­tles. As for the fact that we remem­ber Alexan­der’s name well over two mil­len­nia after his death, it’s safe to say that it would­n’t sur­prise him.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Ancient Greece in 18 Min­utes: A Brisk Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexan­dria: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

The His­to­ry of the Byzan­tine Empire (or East Roman Empire): An Ani­mat­ed Time­line Cov­er­ing 1,100 Years of His­to­ry

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Ani­mat­ed Chap­ter-by-Chap­ter Break­down of the Ancient Chi­nese Trea­tise

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Discover the Legend of Utsuro-bune

in History, Sci Fi | February 22nd, 2023

For the enthu­si­ast of uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects, we live in inter­est­ing times indeed. Back in 2021, as we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, the CIA declas­si­fied and pub­lished thou­sands of pages of UFO-relat­ed doc­u­ments. In just the past few weeks, three UFOs were shot down over North Amer­i­ca. In the span of time between those events, much else has also occurred to stim­u­late the imag­i­na­tion of those who’ve kept watch­ing the skies. Fas­ci­na­tion with UFOs may have strong cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions with twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca — and the sub­ject can now feel a bit passé for that rea­son — but it knows few­er cul­tur­al or tem­po­ral bound­aries than we may think: wit­ness, for exam­ple, the Japan­ese folk­tale of Utsuro-bune.

“In 1803, a round ves­sel drift­ed ashore on the Japan­ese coast and a beau­ti­ful woman emerged, wear­ing strange cloth­ing and car­ry­ing a box. She was unable to com­mu­ni­cate with the locals, and her craft was marked with mys­te­ri­ous writ­ing.” Such is the premise of the leg­end as retold at Nippon.com, which also offers an analy­sis by Gifu Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus Tana­ka Kazuo.

“Long before the Amer­i­can UFO sto­ries, the craft depict­ed in Edo-peri­od Japan­ese doc­u­ments for some rea­son looked like a fly­ing saucer,” he says. Nor have schol­ars traced Utsuro-bune (虚舟, which means “hol­low ship”) back to only one source: to date, Tana­ka “has found eleven doc­u­ments relat­ing to the Hitachi Utsuro-bune leg­end, of which the most inter­est­ing are thought to date from 1803, the same year that the craft was said to have come to shore.”

What exact­ly hap­pened in Hitachi, a small city on Japan’s east coast, in 1803? Why do near con­tem­po­rary depic­tions of the Utsuro-bune itself (espe­cial­ly in the 1835 Hyōryū kishū or “records of cast­aways,” as seen at the top of the post) so close­ly resem­ble mod­ern-day visions of fly­ing saucers? Giv­en that the inci­dent is held to have tak­en place dur­ing the coun­try’s 265-year-long sakoku peri­od of nation­al iso­la­tion, no for­eign­er is like­ly to have crossed over to Japan­ese shores with­out caus­ing a major inci­dent. Unable to com­mu­ni­cate with this mys­te­ri­ous woman, the fish­er­men of Hitachi are said sim­ply to have returned her — box and all — to the hol­low ship, which drift­ed back out to sea, nev­er to be seen again. It was her good luck, some ufol­o­gists might say, to have turned up on Earth a cen­tu­ry and a half before the open­ing of Area 51.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Japan­ese Fairy Tale Series: The Illus­trat­ed Books That Intro­duced West­ern Read­ers to Japan­ese Tales (1885–1922)

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Japan­ese Folk­lore Mon­sters Is Now Open

The Ghosts and Mon­sters of Hoku­sai: See the Famed Wood­block Artist’s Fear­some & Amus­ing Visions of Strange Appari­tions

The CIA Has Declas­si­fied 2,780 Pages of UFO-Relat­ed Doc­u­ments, and They’re Now Free to Down­load

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astro­bi­ol­o­gists Draw a Pic­ture, Based on Dar­win­ian The­o­ries of Evo­lu­tion

The Appeal of UFO Nar­ra­tives: Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ist Paul Beban Vis­its Pret­ty Much Pop #14

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Leonardo’s Lost Sketches Suggest That He Theorized Gravity Before Galileo & Newton

in History, Science | February 21st, 2023

It would be clichéd to describe Leonar­do da Vin­ci as a man ahead of his time. But in the case of the quin­tes­sen­tial Renais­sance poly­math, it may well be one of those clichés firm­ly root­ed in truth. In fact, that root­ing has just grown even firmer with the dis­cov­ery of a tri­an­gle that Leonar­do sketched in one of his note­books, the Codex Arun­del (cir­ca 1478–1518). That tri­an­gle, as the New York Times’ William J. Broad writes, had “an adjoin­ing pitch­er and, pour­ing from its spout, a series of cir­cles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse.” This image sounds sim­ple, but it reveals that Leonar­do approached an under­stand­ing of the laws of grav­i­ty before Galileo, and well before New­ton.

This find­ing is the work of Morteza Gharib, a pro­fes­sor of aero­nau­tics at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. Cap­ti­vat­ed by this sketch, he “used a com­put­er pro­gram to flip the tri­an­gle and the adja­cent areas of back­ward writ­ing,” which clar­i­fied what Leonar­do was attempt­ing to do.

His dia­gram turned out “to split the effects of grav­i­ty into two parts that revealed an aspect of nature nor­mal­ly kept hid­den.” The first part was grav­i­ty’s “nat­ur­al down­ward pull”; the sec­ond was the move­ment of the pitch­er itself along a line. That Leonar­do drew “the pitcher’s con­tents falling low­er and low­er over time” implies his under­stand­ing that “grav­i­ty was a con­stant force that result­ed in a steady accel­er­a­tion.”

Along with co-authors Chris Roh and Flavio Noca, Gharib has pub­lished a paper on “Leonar­do da Vinci’s Visu­al­iza­tion of Grav­i­ty as a Form of Accel­er­a­tion” in this mon­th’s issue of Leonar­do — an appro­pri­ate­ly named jour­nal in this case, though one ded­i­cat­ed less to the study of Leonar­do the man than to the study of the inter­sec­tion of art and sci­ence he occu­pied. As Gharib and oth­ers see it, Leonar­do “was far more than an artist and sug­gest­ed that his fame as a pio­neer­ing sci­en­tist could sky­rock­et if more tech­ni­cal­ly knowl­edge­able experts probed the Codex Arun­del and oth­er sources” — the kind of experts who can tell that, with his pitch­er and tri­an­gle, Leonar­do man­aged to deter­mine the strength of gravity’s pull to an accu­ra­cy of about 97 per­cent. Which leads us to won­der: What else about the nature of real­i­ty must he have worked out in the mar­gins of his note­books?

via Art­net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Watch 80 Minutes of Never-Released Footage Showing the Wreckage of the Titanic (1986)

in History | February 20th, 2023

Per­haps, this past Valen­tine’s Day, you caught a screen­ing of James Cameron’s Titan­ic, that nine­teen-nineties block­buster hav­ing been re-released for its 25th anniver­sary. You may have even found your­self feel­ing a renewed appre­ci­a­tion for the film’s pre­ci­sion-engi­neered mix­ture of Hol­ly­wood romance and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly robust his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ation. As Cameron him­self tells it, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors were gal­va­nized to reach such heights by mak­ing a series of under­wa­ter expe­di­tions to see the wreck­age of the RMS Titan­ic itself first­hand in 1995 — less than a decade after that most noto­ri­ous of all ocean lin­ers was redis­cov­ered.

The Titan­ic van­ished beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912. For near­ly 75 years there­after, nobody saw it again, or indeed had a clear idea of where it even was. It was­n’t until 1985 that its loca­tion was deter­mined, thanks to a joint expe­di­tion by Jean-Louis Michel of French nation­al oceano­graph­ic agency IFREMER and Robert Bal­lard of the Woods Hole Oceano­graph­ic Insti­tu­tion. The job neces­si­tat­ed the use of IFRE­MER’s new high-res­o­lu­tion sonar as well as the WHOI’s remote­ly con­trolled deep-sea vehi­cle Argo and its com­pan­ion robot Jason, designed to take pic­tures and gath­er objects from the sea floor.

When Bal­lard and his crew returned to the Titan­ic the fol­low­ing year, they brought a new cast of machines with them: the deep-div­ing sub­mersible DSV Alvin, the Jason’s descen­dant Jason Jr., and the cam­era sys­tem ANGUS (Acousti­cal­ly Nav­i­gat­ed Geo­log­i­cal Under­wa­ter Sur­vey). You can see more than 80 min­utes of the footage they col­lect­ed in the video at the top of the post, new­ly uploaded to the WHOI’s Youtube chan­nel. This expe­di­tion marked “the first time humans set eyes on the ill-fat­ed ship since 1912,” and most of the footage shot on it has nev­er before been released to the pub­lic.

The video offers close-up views of the Titan­ic’s “rust-caked bow, intact rail­ings, a chief offi­cer’s cab­in and a prom­e­nade win­dow,” as NPR’s Emi­ly Olson writes. “At one point, the cam­era zeroes in on a chan­de­lier, still hang­ing, sway­ing against the cur­rent in a haunt­ing state of ele­gant decay.” What’s more, “the WHOI’s new­ly released footage shows the ship­wreck in the most com­plete state we’ll ever see.” Over the past 37 years, the hand­i­work of the world of under­sea organ­isms have tak­en their toll on the Titan­ic, whose remains could van­ish almost entire­ly in a man­ner of decades — but whose pow­er to inspire works of art will sure­ly go on and on.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See the First 8K Footage of the Titan­ic, the High­est-Qual­i­ty Video of the Ship­wreck Yet

Watch the Titan­ic Sink in This Real-Time 3D Ani­ma­tion

Titan­ic Sur­vivor Inter­views: What It Was Like to Flee the Sink­ing Lux­u­ry Lin­er

The Titan­ic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Dis­as­ter Strikes (1911–1912)

How the Titan­ic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Ani­ma­tion

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Inac­cu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Turning the Pages of an Illuminated Medieval Manuscript: An ASMR Museum Experience

in Books, History, Museums, Neuroscience | February 20th, 2023

Page turn­ing is to ASMR as the elec­tric bass is to rock.

The Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s pop­u­lar Autonomous Sen­so­ry Merid­i­an Response video series (find it here) has seen episodes devot­ed to icon­ic Sec­ond Wave fem­i­nist mag­a­zines and a cou­ple of late 20th-cen­tu­ry pop up artist’s books, but the parch­ment pages of this medieval antiphonary — or choir­book — make for some tru­ly leg­endary sounds.

Audio design­er and per­for­mance-mak­er Julie Rose Bow­er deserves a por­tion of the cred­it for height­en­ing the aur­al expe­ri­ence for her use of the ambison­ics for­mat.

Kudos too to Nation­al Art Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions cura­tor Cather­ine Yvard…if she ever wants a break from medieval man­u­script illu­mi­na­tion and Goth­ic ivory sculp­ture, she could spe­cial­ize in extreme­ly sooth­ing voiceover nar­ra­tion.

It’s rare to find such plea­sur­ably tingly ASMR sen­sa­tions paired with allu­sions to the some­what bar­barous process of mak­ing parch­ment from ani­mal skins, but that’s what illu­mi­na­tor Francesco dai Lib­ri, and his son Giro­lamo were work­ing with in 1492 Verona.

Our ears may not be able to detect much dif­fer­ence between the skin sides and flesh sides of these remark­ably well pre­served pages, but Bow­er does due dili­gence, as Yvard slow­ly drags her fin­gers across them.

No need to fear that Yvard’s bare hands could cause harm to this 530-year-old object.

Experts at the British Library have decreed that the mod­ern prac­tice of don­ning white gloves to han­dle antique man­u­scripts decreas­es man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty, while height­en­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of trans­ferred dirt or dis­lodged pig­ments.

The stur­dy parch­ment of this par­tic­u­lar antiphonary has seen far worse than the care­ful hands of a pro­fes­sion­al cura­tor.

Pages 7, 8, 9 have been singed along the bot­tom mar­gins, and else­where, the goth­ic hand let­ter­ing has been scraped away, pre­sum­ably with a knife, in prepa­ra­tion for a litur­gi­cal update that nev­er got entered.

If your brain is cry­ing out for more after spend­ing 15 and a half inti­mate min­utes with these medieval pages, we leave you with the snap crack­le and pop of oth­er items in the V&A’s col­lec­tion:

Treat your ears to Vic­to­ria and Albert’s full ASMR at the Muse­um playlist here.

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

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The Futurist Architectural Designs Created by Étienne-Louis Boullée in the 18th Century

in Architecture, Art, History | February 15th, 2023

If a painter is ahead of his time, his work won’t sell par­tic­u­lar­ly well while he’s alive. If an archi­tect is ahead of his time, his work prob­a­bly won’t exist at all — not in built form, at least. Such was the case with Éti­enne-Louis Boul­lée, who con­struct­ed few projects in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry in which he lived, almost none of which remain stand­ing today. The best Boul­lée devo­tees can do for a site of pil­grim­age is the Hôtel Alexan­dre in Paris’ eighth arrondisse­ment, which, though hand­some enough, does­n’t quite offer a sense of why he would have devo­tees in the first place. To under­stand that, one must look to Boul­lée’s unbuilt works, the most notable of which are intro­duced in the video from Kings and Things above.

“Paper archi­tect” iden­ti­fies a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion who may design struc­tures pro­lif­i­cal­ly but sel­dom, if ever, builds them. It is not a desir­able label, espe­cial­ly in its impli­ca­tion of will­ful imprac­ti­cal­i­ty (even by archi­tec­tur­al stan­dards). But as prac­ticed by Boul­lée, paper archi­tec­ture became an art form unto itself: he left behind not just an exten­sive essay on his art, but volu­mi­nous draw­ings that envi­sion a host of neo­clas­si­cal build­ings as ambi­tious in his time as they were unfash­ion­able — and often, due to their sheer size, unbuild­able.

These includ­ed an updat­ed colos­se­um, a spher­i­cal ceno­taph for Isaac New­ton taller than the Great Pyra­mids of Giza, a basil­i­ca meant to give its behold­ers an impres­sion of the uni­verse itself, a roy­al library of near-Bor­ge­sian pro­por­tions, and even an actu­al Tow­er of Babel.

 

For Boul­lée, big­ger was bet­ter, an idea that would sweep glob­al archi­tec­ture a cen­tu­ry and a half after his death. By the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the world had also come to accept a Boul­lée-like pref­er­ence for min­i­mal orna­men­ta­tion as well as his con­cep­tion of what his con­tem­po­raries jok­ing­ly termed archi­tec­ture par­lante: that is, build­ings that “speak” about their pur­pose visu­al­ly, and in no uncer­tain terms. (You can hear more about it in the video below, a seg­ment by pro­fes­sor Eri­ka Nagin­s­ki from Har­vard’s online course “The Archi­tec­tu­al Imag­i­na­tion.”) When Boul­lée designed a Palace of Jus­tice, he placed a cour­t­house direct­ly over a jail­house, artic­u­lat­ing “one enor­mous metaphor for crime over­whelmed by the weight of jus­tice.” This may have been a bit much even for the new French Repub­lic, but for those who appre­ci­at­ed Boul­lée’s work, it point­ed the way to the archi­tec­ture of the future — a future we would lat­er call mod­ern.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The World Accord­ing to Le Cor­busier: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Most Mod­ern of All Archi­tects

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? A Cre­ative Use of Google Street View

The Cre­ation & Restora­tion of Notre-Dame Cathe­dral, Ani­mat­ed

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How to Draw Like an Archi­tect: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Archaeologists May Have Discovered a Secret Language in Lascaux & Chauvet Cave Paintings, Perhaps Revealing a 20,000-Year-Old “Proto-Writing” System

in Art, Biology, History, Language, Nature | February 14th, 2023

Care to take a guess what your smart phone has in com­mon with Pale­olith­ic cave paint­ings of Las­caux, Chau­vet and Altami­ra?

Both can be used to track fer­til­i­ty.

Admit­ted­ly, you’re prob­a­bly not using your phone to stay atop the repro­duc­tive cycles of rein­deer, salmon, and birds, but such infor­ma­tion was of crit­i­cal inter­est to our hunter-gath­er­er ances­tors.

Know­ing how cru­cial an under­stand­ing of ani­mal behav­ior would have been to ear­ly humans led Lon­don-based fur­ni­ture con­ser­va­tor Ben Bacon to recon­sid­er what pur­pose might have been served by non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings — slash­es, dots, and Y‑shapes — on the cave walls’ 20,000-year-old images.

Their mean­ing had long elud­ed esteemed pro­fes­sion­als. The marks seemed like­ly to be numer­ic, but to what end?

Bacon put for­ward that they doc­u­ment­ed ani­mal lives, using a lunar cal­en­dar.

The ama­teur researcher assem­bled a team that includ­ed experts from the fields of math­e­mat­ics, arche­ol­o­gy, and psy­chol­o­gy, who ana­lyzed the data, com­pared it to the sea­son­al behav­iors of mod­ern ani­mals, and agreed that the num­bers rep­re­sent­ed by the dots and slash­es are not car­di­nal, but rather an ordi­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of months. 

As Bacon told All Things Con­sid­ered his fel­low self-taught anthro­po­log­i­cal researcher, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Alexan­der Mar­shack, came close to crack­ing the code in the 1970s:

… but he was­n’t actu­al­ly able to demon­strate the sys­tem because he thought that these indi­vid­ual lines were days. What we did is we said, actu­al­ly, they’re months because a hunter-gath­er­er does­n’t need to know what day a rein­deer migrates. They need to know what month the rein­deer migrates. And once you use these months units, this whole sys­tem responds very, very well to that.

As to the fre­quent­ly occur­ring sym­bol that resem­bles a Y, it indi­cates the months in which var­i­ous female ani­mal birthed their young. Bacon and his team the­o­rize in the Cam­bridge Arche­o­log­i­cal Jour­nal that this mark may even con­sti­tute “the first known exam­ple of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’).

Tak­en togeth­er, the cave paint­ings and non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings tell an age-old cir­cu­lar tale of the migra­tion, birthing and mat­ing of aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, hors­es, mam­moths, and rhi­nos … and like snakes and wolver­ines, too, though they were exclud­ed from the study on basis of “excep­tion­al­ly low num­bers.”

Ear­ly humans were able to log months by observ­ing the moon, but how could they tell when a new year had begun, essen­tial infor­ma­tion for any­one seek­ing to arrange their lives around their prey’s pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed activ­i­ties?

Bacon and his peers, like so many poets and farm­ers, look to the rites of spring:

The obvi­ous event is the so-called ‘bonne sai­son’, a French zooar­chae­o­log­i­cal term for the time at the end of win­ter when rivers unfreeze, the snow melts, and the land­scape begins to green.


Read the con­clu­sions of their study here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

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

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

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

 

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How The Beatles Reviewed Songs Topping the Charts During the 1960s: Hear Their Takes on the Beach Boys, Ray Charles, the Byrds, Joan Baez & More

in History, Magazines, Music | February 9th, 2023

In the year 1966, “it seemed to West­ern youth that The Bea­t­les knew — that they had the key to cur­rent events and were some­how orches­trat­ing them through their records.” So writes Ian McDon­ald in the crit­i­cal study Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties. But some had been look­ing to John Lennon, Paul McCart­ney, George Har­ri­son, and Ringo Starr as pop-cul­ture ora­cles since they put out their first album in 1963. Unlike the youth-ori­ent­ed stars who came before, they ful­ly inhab­it­ed the roles of both per­form­ers and cre­ators. If any­one knew how to read the zeit­geist of that decade, sure­ly it was the Bea­t­les.

Hence the appear­ance of each Bea­t­le in Melody Mak­er mag­a­zine’s “Blind Date” fea­ture, which cap­tured its sub­jects’ spon­ta­neous reac­tions to the sin­gles on the charts at the moment. When Lennon sat for a Blind Date in Jan­u­ary of 1964, he gave his ver­dict on songs from Man­fred Mann, Ger­ry and the Pace­mak­ers, Ray Charles, and Ricky Nel­son — as well as the now-less-well-known Mar­ty Wilde, Mil­li­cent Mar­tin, and The Bruis­ers.

You can see the arti­cle turned into a full audio­vi­su­al pro­duc­tion, com­plete with clips of the music, at the Youtube chan­nel Yes­ter­day’s Papers. There you can also com­pare its playlist to that of McCart­ney’s ses­sion just three years lat­er, but on a trans­formed musi­cal land­scape pop­u­lat­ed by the likes of The Small Faces, Dono­van, the Lovin’ Spoon­ful, and the Byrds.

For that last Cal­i­for­nia band McCart­ney express­es appre­ci­a­tion, if also reser­va­tions about what then seemed to him their styl­is­tic stag­na­tion: the late David Cros­by, he notes, “knows where they should be going musi­cal­ly.” Oth­er than call­ing the then-passé Gene Pit­ney’s “In the Cold Light of Day” a song he’s heard “hun­dreds of times before, although I haven’t actu­al­ly heard this record,” he keeps his assess­ment char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly pos­i­tive. More sur­pris­ing are Star­r’s harsh ver­dicts on the pop music of Decem­ber 1964, not just the songs them­selves (though the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” notably fails to impress him), but also the judg­ment of the audi­ences they tar­get. “Being good,” he says of the Day­lighters’ “Oh Mom,” “it won’t sell.”

Of San­dra Bar­ry’s “We Were Lovers (When The Par­ty Began),” Starr com­ments that it “sounds like an Eng­lish­man try­ing to be Amer­i­can, which nev­er works prop­er­ly.” Hav­ing grown up wor­ship­ing Amer­i­can rock-and-roll and start­ed their own careers anx­ious about being received as for­eign inter­lop­ers, the Fab Four show a nat­ur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty to this transat­lantic dynam­ic in pop music. “It’s good if it’s Eng­lish, mediocre if it’s Amer­i­can,” says Har­ri­son of a song before find­ing out that the singer is his coun­try­man Glyn Geof­frey Ellis, bet­ter known as Wayne Fontana. “Those breaks are so British,” Lennon says of a Unit 4 + 2 sin­gle of Decem­ber 1965, and he does­n’t seem to mean it as a good thing. But when McCart­ney calls a Kiki Dee num­ber “British to the core” the fol­low­ing year, it’s hard not to hear a note of admi­ra­tion.

On Yes­ter­day’s Papers’ Blind Date playlist, you can see and hear more nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties music reviews from Mick Jag­ger, Jim­my Page, Jimi Hen­drix, Dusty Spring­field, Frank Zap­pa, Bri­an Jones, Roger Dal­trey, Eric Clap­ton, Roger Waters, Syd Bar­rett, and many oth­er icons of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar music besides.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Kinks’ Ray Davies Reviews the Bea­t­les’ 1966 Album Revolver; Calls It “A Load of Rub­bish”

Chuck Berry (RIP) Reviews Punk Songs by The Ramones, Sex Pis­tols, The Clash, Talk­ing Heads & More (1980)

Hear the 10 Best Albums of the 1960s as Select­ed by Hunter S. Thomp­son

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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