Maybe it will make him more attractive?
Or Someone using the mummies to smuggle drugs into Germany via Egypt. Or a contamination in the testing laboratory. In any case, throwing out the reams of data indicating that there was no connection between Ancient Egypt and South America due to one unusual data point is foolish. Comeback when the data is more convincing.
I snorted.
(no, not that kind! No mummies here!)
It just boggles my mind that nicotine and cocaine residue would be considered evidence of trans Atlantic trade in Ancient times rather than the most logical idea, modern contamination. Practically everyone smoked everywhere, at home ( I knew non smokers in the 70’s who had ashtrays in their house), at work, in labs, in museums (IIRC the Mona Lisa had to have nicotine residue removed in one of its restorations). I don’t smoke in my house because the residue gets everywhere and stinks. Come on just try to think rationally
Capt
Thing is, suppose that there really was a transatlantic trade in the ancient world between Egypt and Brazil.
Other than cocaine and/or nicotine residue in some mummies, what else happened? Why weren’t tobacco seeds brought across the Atlantic? Why didn’t any of the panoply of Old World crops and livestock make it to the Americas, and why didn’t the panoply of New World crops make it to the Mediterranean? Why don’t we find records of these trips, why don’t we find shipwrecks, why don’t we find trading posts, why don’t we find artifacts?
If there was trade between Egypt and the Americas, it was a peculiar sort of trade that wasn’t much like other ancient trade. I’m prepared to believe that any number of Egyptian and Phoenician and Greek and Roman sailors made to to the Americas, and maybe even made it back with a load of something or other. We know for a fact that the Vikings made several trips to the Americas, so the notion that other sailors made it there and back, it’s just that any documentary or archeological evidence of the trip never existed, or was destroyed, or hasn’t yet been found.
But I’m morally certain that there was not regular trade between the continents in antiquity, because if there was regular trade there’d be regular evidence of that regular trade. One shipload of cocaine and tobacco brought back by a lost trading ship doesn’t boggle the mind, but that trip didn’t establish regular trade. The Viking voyages are exactly on point. They came, they set up a village, and then they got chased back to Greenland by angry Skraelings, and they never went back. They didn’t set up regular trading voyages, the landing sites were only occupied for a few years, they didn’t bring back anything notable, the knowledge of a potential new source of timber and other goods never made it out of Greenland and Iceland.
So the Vikings landing in America before Columbus rewrote the history books, sure. Except not so much. Columbus’s voyages marked the beginning of regular trade between continents. The viking voyages were an interesting footnote that didn’t change anything.
Has any test been done on the mummies for traces of taco or burrito residue? Coke, sure, but Coca-Cola? Imagine the implications!
Pyramids. They didn’t look anything alike and were built along vastly different architectural lines and using completely different techniques but** both cultures had** their own kind of pyramids. Checkmate !
Well, they did change something. Namely: the Vikings learned not to fuck with Skraelings and their crazy-ass sound magic, and never came back.
Had the Viking colony in the Americas amounted to any kind of regular trade route, no matter how token, it could have changed the history of both continents. For one thing, the Native-Americans would have learned to expect white men with guns some time soonish, since trade shares the wind with the news. And in turn, maybe Europeans could have gotten used to the idea of there being curious, red-skinned, man-shaped creatures across the sea and settled on the bizarre notion that they could indeed be human beings to be treated as such before spending a couple hundred years of jolly enthusiastic genocide to pass the time while pondering the thorny problem. That could have been nice.
I don’t know about withholding research but there is a very good reason to not easily accept something until you know a bit about how it works. Your observations can be tainted with outside stimuli and other variables. People thought crazy things in the past, they used to think that too much blood was bad and used leeches and lancing to cure people. That kind of ignorance is dangerous.
Also, accepting the obvious explanation without evidence may lead to obscuring of other variables. Magnets may not have anything to do with healing, maybe it’s all neutrinos and Van Der Waals forces, but if people accept magnets as the answer it would be more difficult to accept the truth once its known
Lastly, there are much more concrete and scientific studies on how magnets work, valid and reliable to countless other fields. To say that magnets cure illness is to throw those fields into jeopardy, and it would be irrational to upend the entire study of magnetism because somebody thinks magnets make them feel better. In science, everything touches upon everything else. Accepting that magnets have magical healing properties and we’d have to figure out how they stick on a refrigerator. Is it magnetism, or magic?
I read a SD column once (wish I could remember which one) where Cecil was debunking yet another of these so-called “revolutionary” scientific theories, and he made an excellent point. It seems most of the doubters (who assume the scientific community is suppressing something) think of a scientific theory as like a mathematical proof, where if you can disprove just one premise or a single logical step, the whole thing will come crashing down. On the contrary, Cecil likened a scientific theory to a table with hunderds of legs representing the accepted evidence, where knocking out one leg does nothing to refute the overall theory.
Well, if he needs to travel in his magnet suit, he can just stick himself to the side of a bus.
Focus on Finland: Finland was during the 1866-1868 famine part of the
Russian Empire, and in any case the Wiki article on the 1866-1868 famine
states it was “the last major naturally caused famine in Europe.”
As for the Americas The Wiki “Famine” article lists only two in Brazil
(1877-78 and 1915), and none elsewhere since 1492, so it is reasonable
to assume famine has since well before 1900 been rare to unknown in the Americas.
Thus what I wrote was very close to true.
My original post not actually single out medicine, and did not exclude
non-medical scientific advances. Effective mass water and sewage treatment
have engineering to thank for their existence. Engineered irrigation,
fertilizer and genetics have also been responsible for astronomical increases
in crop yield.
Focusing on medicine, the motivation to supply cleaner water and sewage
treatment, and to promote better personal hygiene would largely have arisen
from the scientifically proven knowledge of the medical germ theory of disease.
Also, scientific nutrition a branch of medicine; it was not developed until
well into the 20th century, with the first vitamin discovered only in 1910.
According to the following cite contagions having a mostly or exclusively
person-to-person respiratory origin were the 1(TB)-6(pneumonia)- 7(diphtheria)-
10(pertussis) leading causes of death in 1850 and the 1(pneumonia) 2(tuberculosis)
-10(diphtheria) causes in 1900:
With the exception of pneumonia they have now dropped off the charts,
and it is disingenuous to baldly assert that the vaccinations and antibiotics
which helped eradicate them had no significant statistical effect on life expectancy.
I do not believe that by ~1870 the medical profession could have failed
to appreciate the need for sanitation. Certainly by 1900 it was fully on board.
This passage is self-contradictory and incoherent.
No, it is not.
Translation: antibiotics and medicine advances like innoculations were largely accomplished post-WWII. Reductions of mortality due to these factors was relatively recent.
Translation: The biggest reductions in mortality were found in late 19th Century and turn of the 20th century, coincident with the big sanitation projects of the Victorian era (clean running water, sewage systems to remove waste, waste treatment facilities).
Only by ignoring three of the four examples I listed. And that’s giving you a fairly autonomous Finland as part of the Russian Empire.
But if you really want to nitpick…
It would help your case therefore for the germ theory to have preceded the grand efforts to improve sanitation. However, the progression is the other way around. Sanitation started first. They caught up by the turn of the century.
Vitamins played a tiny role in scientific nutrition for many years after their discovery. Berthelot in France, Liebig in Germany, Atwater in the U.S. are among the dozens of major researchers into scientific nutrition starting in the mid-19th century. The movement was already huge before the start of the 20th century. The government sent out hundreds of thousands of pamphlets on proper nutrition after major displays on scientific cooking were held at the 1893 World’s Fair. Vitamins couldn’t play a big role because nobody really understood their role and they were hard to manufacture for many years after their discovery.
And that’s why I never assert anything remotely similar. I talked only about the timing. Which is and remains much later than you suggest.
Thank you for the translations. I suspect that my original words were fairly clear to everybody else, though.
All of your examples are pre-1900. post # 22 I stipulated that “famine had been
rare to unknown in Europe and the Americas since well before 1900,” therefore
I needed only single out the last occurring. 1900 was significant because it was
a year by which food was food was plentiful and available” yet life expectancies
were still only about 50 years.
Kindly note my use of the precise phrases “cleaner water” and “sewage treatment.”
You have confused sewers with clean water and sewage treatment. The original
sewer systems were constructed without knowledge of the need for a clean water supply:
(from link, emphasis added):
It took germ theory ensure provision of uncontaminated water for drinking and bathing.
The Wiki section on the history of the study of nutrition confirms you are correct on this topic.
I have reread my posts and do not see where I have been misleading. In post #22 I said
life expectancy was about 50 in 1900, and I have not suggested any details about the timing
of the improvement.
Reduction of mortality due to medicine’s triumph over disease is amazingly recent contradicts The huge reductions were done much earlier in the century or even late 19th century absent specification that you are no longer speaking of reduction due to medicine. The chronology of the beginnings of increase in longevity is incoherently conflated with huge reductions.
“Reduction of mortality due to medicine’s triumph” is a different set of reductions than “the huge reductions”. The chronology is not “incoherently conflated”, it is outright asserted that the huge reductions in mortality were the beginnings of increase in longevity - that they are the same thing - and that the timing of that is consistent with early clean water and sewage projects, not advances in antibiotics and medicine that mostly occurred after WWII.
Poor mummies . If someone could have just told them! JUST SAY NO!
Irishman, thanks again, but I think my statements were clear enough and definitive enough that I’m going to drop out now.
Anybody else is free to compare and evaluate what colonial and I say and decide for themselves.
Just spitballin’ here: You got an ancient South American civilization with some really GOOD drugs. Naturally, one of their local tourist-y things to do is have party cruises.
Now usually, the staff of the party cruise ship has a strict policy of NOT partaking in the refreshments, at least, not when they’re on duty. But on ONE boat, the guy in charge of monitoring the weather forecast has been having a bad week, so he figures a little pick-me-up won’t hurt. So he heads over to the coke buffet and sneaks a little toot. Alas, his bad week is doomed to continue being bad, because in his impaired state, he’s holding a chart upside down. Consequently, the skipper of the craft doesn’t learn about the hurricane until he’s sailed into it.
Fortunately for the partiers, the fearless crew is a little more competent at their jobs than was that of the Minnow, and they are able to successfully ride out the storm until it drops them at the straits of Gibraltar. They sail on through, hoping to find a familiar landmark, and declining to make landfall until they see something they recognize. This strategy is what gets them to the far end of the Mediterranean, and the Nile River delta, where they finally decide to give up and ask for directions.
First contact is made with the Egyptians, and they end up being given an audience with Pharaoh. And they bring along some goodies of an intoxicant nature. Pharaoh is so impressed with his new best friends that he gives them a tour of the Middle Kingdom; they are particularly impressed by the Pyramids. “Say, Pharaoh,” says the captain, “those pyramids are REAL sweet structures, and I think they’d be a big hit back home. Can you show me how to make them?”
“I’ll do better than that,” says Pharaoh. “I’ve got thirteen tribes of slaves who build mine. Tell you what, you give me a stash of those goodies you’ve got in the hold, and I’ll let you have one of the tribes to take home with you. They’ll whip up some pyramids that any pre-columbian civilization would be proud to show off.”
“Deal!” says the captain.
“Hey, Nephi!” calls out Pharaoh. “Get your ass over here pronto, and bring along your crew! I’ve just made a business transaction, and you’re going on a little trip…”
And the rest is histor–errr, speculative, revisionist history, and maybe some theology. The Egyptian royal family hoarded the stash for their own personal use, and managed to make it last for several generations. The South Americans got halfway back to South America before the captain thought to wonder what “pre-columbian” meant, and ALL the way back before they found out that the slaves they had scored were specialists in FEEDING the actual pyramid-building tribes. They made them TRY building pyramids anyway, but the Nephites just didn’t have the mad engineering skillz necessary to achieve the sweet lines of the Egyptian pyramids. What they came up with was very block-y and stair-step-y. So the South American guys fired the Nephites, and told them to get out of town (which they did, traveling north and getting captured and enslaved by one civilization after another, being forced to build stupid, WRONG-looking pyramids, and getting fired, until they finally ended up in North America, where there weren’t any civilizations around to make them build pyramids for them).
Needless to say, the South American party cruise ship operators felt really ripped off, and made no further attempts to maintain contact and trade with those thieving Egyptians. The only evidence that ANY contact was made was trace residues of exotic substances found on Egyptian mummies, thousands of years later.
Also a bunch of pyramids that don’t quite look right on this side of the Atlantic. And a book (which doesn’t actually count as evidence, technically, although it does make this story hang together a LITTLE better).
I have read a lot of the posts trying to feel the status quo of the topic and see that we got way off course and onto other subjects. Getting back on topic, I feel that there are too many variables to infer anything at this point. Many say the bodies were possibly contaminated by outside and modern sources, and that the sample procedure was not strict enough.
does anybody have an idea how long the earth existed before it was inhabited or vegetation was on it? Were not the land masses CLOSER together at some point in time and the climate of the land different in the early days? As the continents separated didn’t climates change and species of all life ( other than man ) die off and become extinct on the continents? Perhaps somebody should be looking into soil samples to see if the coca leaf existed in Egypt. Not all traditions were written on the walls, or remembered. We, in current times are forgetting about some of our culture because it’s not being passed on from generation to generation.
I enjoy history and love learning about the past as it was then. It’s great to look at stuff like this and say to ourselves, " wow this find will rewrite history. " Why are we all so concerned about it. Don’t we just love it when we can find some evidence that has to irrefutably change our way of thinking. What has learning about anything historically done to further our cause to save this earth from pollution and self destruction, and that’s where our energy and intelligence needs to be spent. As Jesus said, " let the dead bury the dead ", and I think there is a greater message in that. This particular evidence you are looking for does absolutely nothing to change what already is, or what has been, yet someone, or many will exhaust a great amount of time investigating this further. To what end? To rewrite history as we know it!? Will it change anything that we will do tomorrow. There is an error in thinking here. These people need to use their energies to preserve what we already have. Maybe they need to write about what is happening in and around the earth now… so it will be in our history books later. With all of the failures I see around me to protect what we already have I already know there will be no need for history ANYTHING. We are polluting our planet and all of its ecosystems so badly there won’t be any need for history. We don’t learn from it in any regard.
No, absolutely not. And the continents separated millions of years before man appeared.
This is called history, exactly what you say we don’t need.
You show no evidence of this.
Everything? I mean, seriously, everything.