#AtoZChallenge Archives – Page 3 of 43

April 23, 2025April 23, 2025

T is for Trepanation

From Switzerland, @3500 BCE, Bronza Age. A woman’s skull had been drilled, and she had survived for some time afterward. Photo by Rama.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go
“Fixing a Hole,” McCartney/Lennon.

Archaeology was a pretty new discipline in the 18th and 19th century, so perhaps we can forgive the excavators who kept finding skulls with holes and tossing them aside. Oh, there’s another that’s been bashed in the head, poor bugger. Communication was a lot slower in, say, 1820, so they didn’t all talk to each other. They didn’t have a chat room where they could all post examples of what they’d found, to suddenly realize that Geez!, there were hundreds of these, and all over the world: Russia, China, Germany, France–especially France–Egypt, Greece, Peru–most especially Peru!

The key advance, if you will, came in 1867 in the Andes, when an artifact collector in South America named George Squiers wrote to an eminent French brain expert named Paul Broca. The rest is trepanation history. Because it turns out that 10,000 years ago, brain surgery was practiced, and it was practiced nearly everywhere.

April 22, 2025April 23, 2025

S is for Ship

Grecian urn 475 BCE depicting Odysseus’ ship, a classic Greek merchant ship that plied the Mediterranean in ancient times. Photo by ArchaiOptix.

The oldest ship in the world that still survives is Dutch. The second oldest is from Africa. They date back to 8000-6000 BCE. This should seem curious because, as we have been looking at the big picture this month, we have seen ancient inventions that go back to the beginning of human existence. We know that somewhere, 100,000 to 30,000 ya, early humans migrated out of Africa, north to Europe, and east to Asia. They didn’t stop there. They kept going down through Southeast Asia and out into the Pacific Islands: Micronesia, Guinea, and Australia. Potentially, 60,000 years ago.

They didn’t walk.

You can talk about land bridges and ice bridges until you’re blue in the face. People did not walk all the way throughout or across the Pacific, even though that has been the dominant narrative for decades. Indonesia was inhabited 32,000 years ago, and at best it was 60 miles from the nearest bit of land back then. There are 10,000-year-old Japanese-style pots in Ecuador and Chilean sweet potatoes in Polynesia.

April 21, 2025April 22, 2025

R is for Rubber

Aztec ballplayers playing “hip ball” in a typical state of undress, as depicted by Christopher Weiditz (1528) in a book on Mesoamerican customs.

Rubber isn’t an Ancient Invention, is it? Wasn’t rubber invented by Charles Goodrich (or was it Goodyear?) Or the Michelin Man? Historians seem to think so. A 2021 textbook on material culture history starts: “Rubber began its global bouncing career in the late 15th century.” Another says : “Columbus discovered rubber!” (Columbus discovered a prison cell is what Columbus discovered. ) Or: “Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber!” (Goodyear.com seems to think so.)

Some encyclopedias rightly credit the Mesoamerican cultures with discovering the properties of rubber, though usually they get two sentences, while Anglo-Europeans like Joseph Priestley, Charles Condamine, and Goodyear get several paragraphs. Let’s be clear. The Olmecs , Mayans, and Aztecs, starting as far back as 1600 BCE, cultivated and used rubber. They understand how to use it, what to use it for, and how to improve it. They were proficient with polymer chemistry–vulcanization–to extend its functionality They also invented sports in ways that would seem eerily familiar to us.

Given that we use rubber every darned day, I thought the Mesoamericans deserved a little more credit than always being the fifth oh, and... culture that I include. I thought they deserved their own post.

This post, therefore, deserves its own three questions: