Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

in Biology, History, Life, Science, Travel | May 9th, 2023

The animals were imperfect,

long-tailed,

unfortunate in their heads.

Little by little they

put themselves together,

making themselves a landscape,

acquiring spots, grace, flight.

The cat,

only the cat

appeared complete and proud:

he was born completely finished,

walking alone and knowing what he wanted.

- Pablo Neruda, excerpt from Ode to the Cat

We find ourselves in agreement with Nobel Prize-winning poet, and cat lover, Pablo Neruda:

Those of us who provide for felines choose to believe we are “the owner, proprietor, uncle of a cat, companion, colleague, disciple or friend of (our) cat”, when in fact they are mysterious beasts, far more self-contained than the companionable, inquisitive canine Neruda immortalized in Ode to the Dog.

We can bestow names and social media accounts on cats of our acquaintance, channel them on the steps of the Met Gala, attach GPS trackers to their collars, give them pride of placement in books for children and adults, and try our best to get inside their heads, but what do we know about them, really?

We even got their history wrong.

Common knowledge once held that cats made their way to northern Europe from the Mediterranean aboard Roman — and eventually Viking — ships sometime between the 3rd to 7th century CE, but it turns out we were off by millennia.

In 2016, a team of researchers collaborating on the Five Thousand Years of History of Domestic Cats in Central Europe project confirmed the presence of domestic cats during the Roman period in the area that is now northern Poland, using a combination of zooarchaeology, genetics and absolute dating.

More recently, the team turned their attention to Felis bones found in southern Poland and Serbia, determining the ones found in the Jasna Strzegowska Cave to be Pre-Neolithic (5990–5760 BC), while the Serbian kitties hail from the Mesolithic-Neolitic era (6220–5730 BC).

In addition to clarifying our understanding of how our pet cats’ ancestors arrived in Central Europe from Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the project seeks to “identify phenotypic features related to domestication, such as physical appearance, including body size and coat color; behavior, for example, reduced aggression; and possible physiological adaptations to digest anthropogenic food.”

Regarding non-anthropogenic food, a spike in the Late Neolithic Eastern European house mouse population exhibits some nifty overlap with these ancient cat bones’ newly attached dates, though Dr. Danijela Popović, who supervised the project’s paleogeneticians, reports that the cats’ arrival in Europe preceded that of the first farmers:

These cats probably were still wild animals that naturally colonized Central Europe.

We’re willing to believe they established a bulkhead, then hung around, waiting until the humans showed up before implementing the next phase of their plan — self-domestication.

Read the research team’s “history of the domestic cat in Central Europe” here.

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via Big Think

– Ayun Halliday, human servant of two feline Mailroom Böyz, 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Published Collection of Shakespeare’s Plays, Published 400 Year Ago (1623)

in Books, History, Museums, Theatre | May 8th, 2023

Summer’s lease may have all too short a date, but every year, it’s time enough for dozens, nay, hundreds of free Shakespeare productions to pop up in the parks and parking lots.

We owe these pleasures in part to the First Folio, a fat collection of Shakespeare’s plays, compiled in 1623, seven years after his death.

As Elizabeth James, senior librarian at the National Art Library in London, and Harriet Reed, contemporary performance curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum point out in the show-and-tell above, 18 previously-unpublished plays would have sunk into oblivion had they not been truffled up and preserved here by John Heminge and Henry Condell, listed in the Folio as among the ‘Principall Actors’ of his work.

You may be able to imagine a world without Cymbeline or Timon of Athens, but what about Macbeth or The Tempest?

Hemings and Condell’s desire to create an accurate compendium of Shakespeare’s work for posterity led them to scour prompt books, authorial fair copy, and working drafts referred to as “foul papers” — a term rife for revival, in our opinion — for the texts of the unpublished works.

Their labors yielded some 750 copies of a luxurious, high-priced volume, which positioned Shakespeare as someone of such consequence, his words were to be accorded the same reverence as that of classical authors’.

They categorized the plays as comedies, tragedies, or histories, forever cementing our conceptions of the individual works.

The now familiar portrait of the author also contributed to the perceived weightiness of the tome.

Of the 230-some First Folios that survive, the bulk are in library or university collections — with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Tokyo’s Meisei University, the New York Public Library, the British Library the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton among those holding multiple copies.

Some retain the handwritten annotations of their original owners, a meticulous record of plays seen or read. How many would you be able to check off as something read or seen?

All’s Well That Ends Well,

Antony and Cleopatra

As You Like It

The Comedy of Errors

Coriolanus

Cymbeline

Henry VI, Part 1

Henry VII

Julius Caesar

King John,

Macbeth

Measure for Measure

The Taming of the Shrew

The Tempest

Timon of Athens

Twelfth Night

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Winter’s Tale.

An online version of the First Folio can be viewed here.

via Aeon

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– 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Amazing Engineering of Gauntlets (Armored Gloves) from the 16th Century

in History | May 5th, 2023

The phrase “to throw down the gauntlet” means to issue a challenge, and this is understood all over the English-speaking world — even by those who have no idea what, exactly, a gauntlet is. “The word itself comes from the French word gantelet, and referred to the heavy, armored gloves worn by medieval knights,” writes History.com’s Elizabeth Harrison. “In an age when chivalry and personal honor were paramount, throwing a gauntlet at the feet of an enemy or opponent was considered a grave insult that could only be answered with personal combat, and the offended party was expected to ‘take up the gauntlet’ to acknowledge and accept the challenge.”

How many of us, here in the twenty-first century, have ever literally taken up a gauntlet? Adam Savage never has, which may come as a surprise to fans of the former MythBusters co-host and enthusiast of combat technologies past, present, and future.

Or at least he hadn’t until making the new video above, which finds him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Arms and Armor conservation lab. There, armorer Ted Hunter has opened up the museum’s “gauntlet drawer” and laid out an array of genuine examples for Savage to take up, all of them made in Germany or Italy in the sixteenth century.

Each of these gauntlets was made in a different style, with details like a fine-meshed chain mail underside (to make it easier to keep a grip on your sword) or even a locking spring catch (to make it impossible to let go of your sword at all). Savage marvels at these features, but also the visibly painstaking craftsmanship that went into every aspect of these gauntlets’ construction, which he has more than enough experience to understand. His enthusiasm and knowledge are evidenced by the wealth of armor-related videos on his Youtube channel, including a series about building his own full suit of armor, a challenge that it was inevitable he would set himself against — a gauntlet, in other words, he both threw down and took up.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Pioneering Data Visualizations of William Playfair, Who Invented the Line, Bar, and Pie Charts (Circa 1786)

in Data, History | May 4th, 2023

“If you see a pie chart projected twelve feet high in front of you, you know you’re in the hands of an idiot.” These words have stuck with me since I heard them spoken by Edward Tufte, one of the most respected living authorities on data visualization. The latter-day sins of pie-chart-makers (especially those who make them in PowerPoint) are many and varied, but the original sin of the pie chart itself is that of fundamentally misrepresenting one-dimensional information — a company budget, a city’s population demographics — in two-dimensional form.

Yet the pie chart was created by a master, indeed the first master, of information design, the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish economist William Playfair. Tufte includes Playfair’s first pie chart, an illustration of the land holdings of various nations and empires circa 1800, in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

“The circle represents the area of each country,” Tufte explains. “The line on the left, the population in millions read on the vertical scales; the line on the right, the revenue (taxes) collected in millions of pounds sterling read also on the vertical scale.” The dotted lines between them show, in Playfair’s words, whether “the country is burdened with heavy taxes or otherwise” in proportion to its population.

Playfair was experimenting with data visualization long before his invention of the pie chart. He also came up with the more truthful bar chart, history’s first example of which appeared in his Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786. That same book also contains the striking graph above, of England’s “exports and imports to and from Denmark and Norway from 1700 to 1780,” whose lines create fields that make the balance of trade legible at a glance. A much later example of the line graph, another form Playfair is credited with inventing, appears just below, “exhibiting the revenues, expenditure, debt, price of stocks and bread from 1770 to 1824,” a period spanning the American and French Revolutions as well as the Napoleonic Wars.

It’s safe to say that Playfair lived in interesting times, and even within that context lived an unusually interesting life. During Great Britain’s wars with France, he served his country as a secret agent, even coming up with a plan to counterfeit assignats, a French currency at the time, in order to destabilize the enemy’s economy. “Their assignats are their money,” he wrote in 1793, “and it is better to destroy this paper founded upon an iniquitous extortion and a villainous deception than to shed the blood of men.” Two years after the plan went into effect, the assignat was worthless and France’s ship of state had more or less run aground. Playfair’s measures may seem extreme, but then, you don’t win a war with pie charts.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Renaissance Masters Added Egg Yolk to Their Paints: A New Study Sheds Light

in Art, History, Science | May 2nd, 2023

Today we think of the Renaissance as one of those periods when everything changed, and if the best-known artifacts of the time are anything to go by, nothing changed quite so much as art. This is reflected in obvious aesthetic differences between the works of the Renaissance and those created before, as well as in less obvious technical ones. Egg yolk-based tempera paints, for example, had been in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but in the fifteenth century they were replaced by oil paints. When chemical analysis of the work of certain Renaissance masters revealed traces of egg, they were assumed to be the result of chance contamination.

Now, thanks to a recent study led by chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we have reason to believe that painters like Botticelli and Leonardo kept eggs in the mix deliberately. Oil replaced tempera because “it creates more vivid colors and smoother color transitions,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Teresa Nowakowski.

“It also dries slowly, so it can be used for longer after the initial preparation.” But “the colors darken more easily over time, and the paint is more susceptible to damage from light exposure. It also has a tendency to wrinkle as it dries,” visible in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation below.

Putting in a bit of egg yolk may have been a way of using oil’s advantages while minimizing its disadvantages. Ranquet and her collaborators tested this idea by doing it themselves, re-creating two pigments used during the Renaissance, both with egg and without. “In the mayolike blend” produced by the former method, writes ScienceNews’ Jude Coleman, “the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency,” though the paint itself would take longer to dry.

In practice, Renaissance painters seem to have experimented with different proportions of oil and egg, and so discovered that each had its own strengths for rendering different elements of an image. Hyperallergic’s Taylor Michael writes that in The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Botticelli painted Christ, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin, among others, with tempera, and the background stone and foregrounding grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxidization-slowing effects of phospholipids and antioxidants in the yolk — as scientific research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five centuries looking hardly worse for wear.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Art of Patrick Nagel, Still Seen in Nail Salons Today, Crystallized the 1980s Aesthetic

in Art, History | May 2nd, 2023

To find a visual definition of the nineteen-eighties, you need look no further than the windows of the nearest run-down hair or nail salon. There, “faded by time and years of sun damage,” remain on makeshift display the most widely recognized works of — or imitations of the works of — artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who specialized in images of women with “sleek black hair, paper-white skin, bold red lipstick and a look of mystery, power, and cool detachment.” So says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video essay above on the sudden rise and lasting cultural legacy of the “Nagel women.”

As Puschak tells the story, the figure responsible for launching Nagel and his women into the zeitgeist was publisher Karl Bornstein, who “had been in Europe admiring the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard, Parisian poster artists of the late nineteenth century, and came back to America looking for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.”

Around this same time, “the manager of the English new-wave band Duran Duran saw Nagel’s work in Playboy, and commissioned a picture for the cover of their 1982 album Rio” — which, apart from all those salon windows, gave most of us our first look at a Nagel woman.

These and other pop-cultural associations “helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.” For years after Nagel’s death in 1984, his “chic, fashionable, independent” women continued to serve as “aspirational images,” but eventually, amid market saturation and changing sensibilities, their bold look of glamor and professionalism began to seem tacky. Nevertheless, rediscovery always follows desuetude, and sufficient distance from the actual eighties has allowed us to appreciate Nagel’s technique. “Day by day, little by little, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest number of lines that would still capture the spirit of his models,” using rigorous minimalism to evoke — and forever crystallize — a time of brazen excess.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

1,800 Hand-Cut Silhouettes of 19th-Century Historical Figures Get Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian

in Art, History, Life, Museums, Technology | May 1st, 2023

With the exception of Kara Walker’s provocative cut paper narratives, silhouettes haven’t struck us as a particularly revealing art form.

Perhaps we would have felt differently in the early 19th-century, when silhouettes offered a quick and affordable alternative to oil portraits, and photography had yet to be invented.

Self-taught silhouette artist William Bache traveled the eastern seaboard, and later to New Orleans and Cuba, plying his trade with a physiognotrace, a device that helped him outline subjects’ profiles on folded sheets of light paper.

Once a profile had been captured, Bache carefully cut inside the tracing and affixed the “hollow-cut” surrounding sheet to black paper, creating the appearance of a hand-cut black silhouette on a white background.

Customers could purchase four copies of these shadow likenesses for 25¢, which, adjusted for inflation, is about the same amount as a photo strip in one of New York City’s vintage photobooths these days — $5.

Bache was an energetic promoter of his services, advertising that if customers found it inconvenient to visit one of his pop-up studios, he would “at the shortest notice, wait upon them at their own Dwellings without any additional expense.”

Naturally, people were eager to lay hands on silhouettes of their children and sweethearts, too.

One of Bache’s competitors, Raphaelle Peale assumed the perspective of a satisfied male customer to tout his own business:

‘Tis almost herself, Eliza’s shade,

Thus by the faithful facietrace pourtray’d!

Her placid brow and pouting lips, whose swell

My fond impatient ardor would repell.

Let me then take that vacant seat, and there

Inhale her breath, scarce mingled with the air:

And thou blest instrument! which o’er her face

Did’st at her lips one moment pause, retrace

My glowing form and leave, unequall’d bliss!

Borrow’d from her, a sweet etherial Kiss.

Hot stuff, though hopefully besotted young lovers refrained from pressing their lips to the silhouettes they loved best. Conservators in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which houses Bache’s sample book, a ledger filled with likenesses of some 1,800 sitters, discovered it to be suffused with arsenic, presumably meant to repel invading rodents and insects.

Most of the heads in Bache’s album arrived unidentified, but by combing through digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills, marriage certificates and Ancestry.com, lead curator Robyn Asleson and Getty-funded research assistant Elizabeth Isaacson have managed to identify over 1000.

There are some whose names — and profiles — remain well known more than 200 years later. Can you identify George Washington, Martha Washington, and Thomas Jefferson on the album page below?

Some pages contain entire families. Pedro Bidetrenoulleau coughed up $1.25 for his own likeness, as well as those of his wife, and children Félix, Adele, and Zacharine, numbers 638 through 642, below.

Bache’s travels to New Orleans and Cuba make for a racially diverse collection, though little is known about most of the Black sitters. Dr. Asleson suspects some of these might be the only existing portraits of these individuals, particularly in the case of New Orleanians in mixed-race relationships, whose descendants destroyed strategic evidence in the effort to “pass” as white:

As I was learning more and more about this history, I really began to hope that some of the people who are trying to find their heritage today, who realize it might have been deliberately eradicated to protect their ancestors from oppression, might have the chance to discover an image of a great-great-grandfather or grandmother.

Readers, if you are the caretaker of passed down family silhouettes, perhaps you can help the curators get closer to putting a name to someone who currently exists as little more than a shadow in interesting headgear.

Even if you’re not in possession of a silhouette, you may well be one of the tens of thousands living in the United States today connected to the album by blood.

Explore an arsenic-free, interactive copy of William Bache’s silhouette ledger book here.

via NYTimes

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– 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

in History, Maps, Travel | April 28th, 2023

At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-speed rail service connecting those two countries, can get you from Paris to Brussels in about an hour and half. This stands in contrast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its political power lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expansive network of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imagining what it would have been like to travel Europe two millennia ago. And now, using the website OmnesViae, you can get historically accurate directions as well.

Big Think’s Frank Jacobs describes OmnesViae as “the online route planner the Romans never knew they needed.” It “leans heavily on the Tabula Peutingeriana” — also known as the Peutinger Map, and previously featured here on Open Culture — “the closest thing we have to a genuine itinerarium (‘road map’) of the Roman Empire.”

Though not quite geographically accurate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were connected and how. “Geolocating thousands of points from Peutinger, OmnesViae reformats the roads and destinations on the scroll onto a more familiarly landscaped map. The shortest route between two (ancient) points is calculated using the distances traveled over Roman rather than modern roads, also taking into account the rivers and mountains the network must cross.”

You can use OmnesViae just like any other way-finding application, except you enter your origin and destination into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities current day names are understood,” as the instructions note, it works better — and feels so much more authentic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Londinio.” The resulting journey between those two great capitals looks arduous indeed, passing at least three mountainous areas, thirteen rivers, and countless smaller settlements. And according to OmnesViae, no roads led to Brussels: the closest an ancient traveler could get to the location of the modern-day seat of the European Union was the Walloon village of Liberchies — which, as the birthplace of Django Reinhardt, remains an important stop for the jazz-loving traveler of Europe today.

via Big Think

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Lifelines of Their Vast Empire

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Travel Today

How to Make Roman Concrete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Lasting Building Materials

The First Transit Map: a Close Look at the Subway-Style Tabula Peutingeriana of the 5th-Century Roman Empire

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Published Collection of Shakespeare’s Plays, Published 400 Year Ago (1623)

The Amazing Engineering of Gauntlets (Armored Gloves) from the 16th Century

The Pioneering Data Visualizations of William Playfair, Who Invented the Line, Bar, and Pie Charts (Circa 1786)

Why Renaissance Masters Added Egg Yolk to Their Paints: A New Study Sheds Light

How the Art of Patrick Nagel, Still Seen in Nail Salons Today, Crystallized the 1980s Aesthetic

1,800 Hand-Cut Silhouettes of 19th-Century Historical Figures Get Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

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