"Hungry giant predators, treacherous mud and a tired, probably cranky toddler -- more than 10,000 years ago, that was the stuff of every parent's nightmare. Evidence of that type of frightening trek was recently uncovered, and at nearly a mile it is the longest known trackway of early-human footprints ever found." Source: Science Daily.
"...The tracks were found in a dried-up lakebed, which contains a range of other footprints dating from 11,550 to 13,000 years ago. The lakebed's formerly muddy surface preserved footprints for thousands of years as it dried up.
"Previously found in the terrain are the prints of animals such as mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. Sloths and mammoths were found to have intersected the human tracks after they were made, showing that this terrain hosted both humans and large animals at the same time, making the journey taken by this individual and child a dangerous one."
"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorousflightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.
It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."
"Scientists have unearthed fossils in the United States of a big land-dwelling crocodile that lived about 231 million years ago, walked on its hind legs and was a top land predator right before the first dinosaurs appeared." Source: The Guardian.
"Transported back to the Triassic Period, what would a person experience upon encountering this agile, roughly 9-foot-long (about 3 meter-long), 5-foot-tall (about 1.5 meter-tall) beast with a long skull and blade-like teeth?
"'Abject terror,' said North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports."
Comment: This bizarre and terrifying crocodile ancestor is called Carnufex carolinensis, which means "Carolina butcher". I know that Triassic-period monsters don't really fit in with the normal subjects covered by the Ancient World Review, but who cares? I can always find room for crocodiles that walked on two legs and had an "insatiable blood lust."
"Leif Erikson Day is an annual observance that occurs on October 9. It honors Leif Erikson ... the Norse explorer who led the first Europeans thought to have set foot in continental North America (other than Greenland)." (Wikipedia)
Note: I'm several days late with this, but technically it doesn't really matter. According to Wikipedia, "October 9 is not associated with any particular event in Leif Erikson's life. The date was chosen because the ship Restauration coming from Stavanger, Norway, arrived in New York Harbor on October 9, 1825, beginning a wave of immigration from Norway to America."
Note: Leif Erickson's brother apparently ran into some trouble with the local population:
"According to the Icelandic sagas, while in Vinland [North America], Leif and his crew came into contact with 'Red Indians' (as distinguished from the Inuit), whom they referred to as skrælingi, an archaic term for 'wretches.' According to these sagas, the encounters with the indigenous people were initially friendly with a strong trade relationship. Tensions rose when Leif's brother, Thorvald, was struck by an arrow in a fight with the skrælingi. He is famously known for pulling the arrow out, and poetically reciting the phrase, 'This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my entrails', upon which he dies." (Wikipedia)
I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.
The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.
This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.
There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.
Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.
There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.
Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.
There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.
They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to strike a blow, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.
Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.
All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.
Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.
"It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th and 14th century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave knight in shining armor facing down a snail." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2013).
"It’s a great unsolved mystery of medieval manuscripts ... Epic snail-on-knight combat showed up as often in medieval manuscripts as Kilroy across Europe. 'But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange,' says the British Library, rounding up a number of examples of the slimy battles."
"The early inhabitants of North America left behind precious few clues of their existence — a footprint here, a weapon and a mummy there — leading scientists to wonder exactly when the first people arrived on the continent." Source: Live Science (7/22/20).
"Now, two new studies report a stunningly early date: Humans may have been living on the continent at least 30,000 years ago.
"That would mean that the first North Americans may have arrived before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), between about 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of what is now the northern U.S. and Canada. However, humans didn't become widespread on the continent until about 14,700 years ago, when the population boomed."
If the dating is accurate, this is a revolutionary, though not exactly surprising discovery. Up until now the consensus was that the first people in the Americas belonged to the Clovis Culture (named after the prehistoric Clovis-points which have been found all across North America and in northern South America). These stone projectile points date back to around 13,500 to 12,800 years ago, according to Wikipedia.
The Clovis First theory, "the predominant hypothesis among archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century," argued "that the people associated with the Clovis culture were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The primary support for this was that no solid evidence of pre-Clovis human habitation had been found. According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the period of lowered sea levels during the ice age, then made their way southward through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Western Canada as the glaciers retreated." (Wikipedia)
According to the Clovis First theory, the first Americans arrived here around 13,000 years ago, but various archaeologists have been challenging the theory for years. Just to give one example, the NY Times story in the next video reports on the discovery of what appeared to be pre-Clovis artifacts in Brazil back in 2014.
The Clovis-First theory is now officially dead:
"The peopling of the Americas marks a major expansion of humans across the planet. However, questions regarding the timing and mechanisms of this dispersal remain, and the previously accepted model (termed ‘Clovis-first’)—suggesting that the first inhabitants of the Americas were linked with the Clovis tradition, a complex marked by distinctive fluted lithic points—has been effectively refuted." Source: The timing and effect of the earliest human arrivals in North America, Nature, May 26 2020.
"People in what is now Washington State were smoking Rhus glabra, a plant commonly known as smooth sumac, more than 1,400 years ago. The discovery marks the first-time scientists have identified residue from a non-tobacco plant in an archeological pipe." Source: Science Daily.
Sumac is an edible plant which can be chewed for its moisture or made into a drink similar to lemonade. The plant doesn't appear to have any psychoactive properties, but it is said to cause vivid dreams. Some sources claim that sumac is medicinal. According to Alternate Nature Online Herbal, for instance, "The active constituents in Sumac are being studied for use in many diseases some possible applications are in the treatment of TB, diabetes, and some cancers."
Information like this will be good to know when the economy collapses.
Note: "The discovery [that sumac was smoked in this pipe] was made possible by a new metabolomics-based analysis method that can detect thousands of plant compounds or metabolites in residue collected from pipes, bowls and other archeological artifacts. The compounds can then be used to identify which plants were smoked or consumed." (Science Daily)
"The peopling of the New World is still a controversial debate today. In fact, there is no consensus on whether the first settlers arrived in one or several migration waves. Nevertheless, most recent research based on genetic data supports the view that the New World was peopled across the Bering Strait about 18,000 years before the present (ybp). Some authors propose two routes for a rapid human expansion across the continent, one coastal and the other inland; although other alternative routes have been proposed. The hypothesis for the human colonization of America is largely based on the study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which, from the very first studies, has shown that extant Native American populations exhibit six mtDNA different haplogroups (hgs). These can be classified into the following autochthonous hgs: A2, B2, C1, D1, D4h3, and X2a [1]. The fact that these lineages are restricted to a specific geographical area allows us to reconstruct the micro-evolutionary history of Mesoamerica and bordering areas." Source: PLOS ONE (2015).
[1] Most of these haplogroups are thought to have originated in various parts of Asia, though two of them (C and X) apparently come from the Near East and parts of southern or eastern Europe (the Caspian Sea region, for instance). This implies that there was a general eastward movement of peoples from all across the Euro-Asian continent which eventually led to the crossing of the Bering land bridge into the New World. Eastern European and Near Eastern peoples were probably involved in these migrations. Why not? Lots of hunter-gatherers were drifting east back then.
It's also possible that small groups of Polynesians crossed over to South America by boat and I still think it's possible that some Europeans may have reached the extreme northeastern coast of the New World, perhaps by following the north Atlantic ice shelves. The evidence for the latter is sketchy, though; if it exists it's probably buried in the sea off the coast of Newfoundland. If true, these theories would explain the early presence of people in Florida and the southernmost part of South America, but this is still mostly speculation.
"Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still debated. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact." (Wikipedia)
Maize (corn) is thought to have been domesticated in southern Mexico around 10,000 years ago. If the dates are correct, it took around 6,000 years for the cultivation of maize to spread to the American southwest and another 3,000 years for the crop to reach Cahokia in the midwest. This very slow spread can be explained, at least partly, by the fact that it took time for maize to adapt to northern climates, but it also suggests that the indigenous peoples of the ancient Americas were fairly static, spending most of their time in their traditional territories.
When maize reached Cahokia it was just a small village, but around a century later (or less) the settlement began to expand dramatically:
"Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from 'a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant' ... The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed." (Science Daily)
Conan The Barbarian Wouldn't Look Like Arnold Schwarzenegger
I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.
The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.
This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.
There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.
Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.
There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.
Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.
There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.
They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to strike a blow, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.
Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.
All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.
Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient America, Barbarians, Books, Commentary, Videos | Permalink