Tag Archives: warfare

Why We Should Worry about Neanderthal Clones

February 8, 2010

Should we clone Neanderthals? That’s the provocative question that science writer and editor Zach Zorich poses in the forthcoming issue of Archaeology, hitting the news stand on February 15th. I received an advance copy late last week and read Zorich’s article this weekend. I’ve been thinking about this question ever since, and already I have arrived at my own answer. No. No. NO.

First of all, I should point out that this is not a pie-in-the-sky question. Zorich interviewed an impressive A-list of researchers–including geneticists who are sequencing the Neanderthal genome and leading paleoanthropologists who study ancient hominins–and some clearly believe that a cloned Neanderthal awaits us somewhere down the line.

So it’s not too early to begin thinking and debating about the ethics of cloning one of our hominin kin. While some researchers champion the idea out of pure scientific curiosity and the desire to learn more about an extinct hominin, I think it’s a terrible idea. I simply don’t trust my fellow Homo sapiens sapiens to treat another hominin with kindness and respect. Our track record with other primates, for example, is appalling–using chimpanzees for circus shows and laboratory experimentation, hunting gorillas for meat, and killing orangutan mothers in order to sell their babies as pets.

And here’s something else that worries me about a Neanderthal clone. In the 1920s, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the researcher who perfected the technique of artificial insemination, Ilya Ivanov, to create a “living war machine. ” Ivanov’s brief, as American writer Charles Siebert reports in his remarkable book, The Wachula Woods Accord, was to artificially inseminate chimpanzees with human sperm to create a new hybrid.

Stalin dreamed of a large, invincible Red Army and a vast slave workforce to carry out his Five Year Plans. He thought a chimp-human hybrid would serve admirably. According to Russian newspapers, Stalin told Ivanov “I want a new invincible human being insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

Ivanov failed miserably to produce such chimp-human hybrid, though he certainly tried. In 1930s, the biologist fell from political grace and was exiled to Kazakhstan in one of the many purges of the time.

All this strikes me as an important cautionary tale. What if one of the world’s dictators got it into his head to clone Neanderthals as slave laborers or a new kind of soldier, one physically stronger than modern humans? It sounds far fetched, I know. But I don’t think we can blithely ignore the lessons of history.

Jihadist and Young Archaeologist

February 1, 2010

Did Mohamed Atta, the man who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into a World Trade Center tower, pay for his flying lessons by selling looted antiquities? It now looks like a distinct possibility. According to The Art Newspaper, a senior Italian official has stated publicly on several occasions that Germany’s secret service, BND, possesses testimony documenting Atta’s attempt to sell looted Afghan artifacts to a German archaeologist in 1999.

Atta, as you may recall, was born into a wealthy Egyptian family and graduated from the University of Cairo in 1990 with a degree in architecture. After a short stint as an architectural planner in Cairo, the young Egyptian moved in 1992 to Germany, where he enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. There Atta studied under Dittmar Machule, an expert on Middle Eastern architecture who was conducting an archaeological excavation at a Bronze-Age site in northern Syria.

So interested did Atta become in archaeology that Machule invited him to visit the Syrian dig in 1994. The German professor later recalled what happened in an interview with ABC television. Atta, said Machule, “slept in the tent as we all slept and he was very interested in the excavation. I explained to him what we are doing, the methods of archaeology, the research and I remember that he wanted to help.”

Five years later, in 1999, says Guiseppi Proietti, secretary general of Italy’s Ministry of Culture, Atta approached a University of Goettingen archaeologist with a business proposition. He offered to sell the unnamed archaeologist Afghan artifacts, explaining that he needed the money to pay for flying lessons he wanted to take in the United States. The archaeologist declined the offer.

How might Atta have obtained these artifacts? As investigators have now established, Atta became increasingly radicalized during his studies in Germany and disappeared for lengthy periods of time. During the university’s winter break in 1997, for example, he vanished for three months, and applied on his return for a new passport, claiming he had lost his–a common strategy that jihadists employed to conceal their travel to a terrorist camp.

With his newfound knowledge of archaeology, Atta may have spent his spare time in Afghanistan looting remote sites and collecting antiquities. And it certainly seems possible that he sold the plunder privately or through auction houses in order to finance the flying lessons that ended in such terrible tragedy.

This is an appalling scenario–European collectors financing one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent memory. I sure would like to know more about this.

The Burner of Books

January 26, 2010

The China Daily News carried a very cool story this week on a major new archaeological discovery in Hubei province. According to Shen Haining, the director of Hubei’s cultural heritage bureau, excavators working in a tomb that dates back to the Warring States period of China’s history (475-221 B.C. ) recovered a trove of water-saturated bamboo strips covered in inked Chinese characters. Resembling a snarl of soggy noodles, the strips are remains of ancient and exceedingly rare Chinese books–a find that is sure to generate huge interest in China and abroad.

Perhaps a little Chinese history is in order here to help make sense of this find. The Warring States period, as its name clearly suggests, was a time of massive violent military clashes. Lords of seven major states all vied for supreme power in tianxia (which means “all under heaven”), and they threw huge infantry armies bristling with mass-produced iron weapons at one another. These armies also boasted for the first time in Chinese history archers with crossbows and soldiers fighting on horseback, both of which completely transformed military engagements in the Far East, rendering them far more horrifying.

The period came to an end finally when one of the combatant lords, Qin Shi Huang, subjugated all his rivals. But while the new emperor brought peace to China, he committed a grave sin against history and literature. Fearing that all earlier books would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his rule, Qin Shi Huang ordered most Chinese books of the day to be burned and he had scholars who possessed such forbidden writings buried alive–making bamboo-strip books dating from the Warring States period rare indeed today.

You might ask yourself why we should care today about the fate of these lost Chinese documents, many of which were recorded on bamboo strips. Well, it turns out that amid all the bloodshed and chaos of the time, many of China’s greatest thinkers were discussing warfare and dreaming of peace. Many of their works were undoubtedly lost in the destruction ordered by Qin Shi Huang, though a few, including the very famous meditation The Art of War, survived to the present thanks to later copyists.

I am dying to find out what the soggy bamboo strips in the newly discovered Hubei tomb will hold. “It’s still to early to tell,” Shen told the China Daily reporter. “Let’s wait and see. Archaeology is all about surprise.” Hear, hear.

How Early Wooden Armor Defeated Russian Firearms

January 15, 2010

As regular readers will know, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about ancient forms of body armor. I got started on this subject last weekend, when I read about new research on the cloth armor that Alexander the Great and his army favored. But a question from reader Dan Hilborn and a very cool post over at Northwest Coast Archaeology (one of my favorite blogs) have led me to the subject of wooden armor, specifically the armor Tlingit men wore into battle against Russian traders in the late 18th century.

The Russians coveted furs — primarily the sea-otter fur, which is the thickest and warmest of any mammal on Earth. By the 18th century, these traders had pretty much exhausted the sea-otter populations that once flourished in Siberia’s kelp forests, so they sailed further east along the coast of the Bering Sea, searching for new kelp forests and more sea-otters. Along the Aleutian Islands, Alaska and eventually northern British Columbia, they spied abundant sea-otter habitat

Initially, the Russians traders sailed into Aleut villages, taking women and children hostages in order to force the men to bring them pelts. They did not hesitate to murder their captives if things didn’t go their way. In 1745, a Russian group slaughtered 15 Aleuts on the island of Attu, just to strike terror into the hearts of the villagers. The Aleut people, in turn, tried to expel these ruthless invaders from their lands, but Russian firearms and Russian diseases took a terrible toll.

Eventually, the Russians worked their way southward into Tlingit territory. Like many Northwest Coast peoples, the Tlingit fished the bountiful rivers and coasts of their territory and hunted sea lions and other sea mammals. They had a rich, complex culture, with chiefs, nobles and even slaves. To settle grievances with their neighbors, they embarked on raiding parties from time to time, outfitting themselves in armor made from the one of the most bountiful materials in their territory: wood. Tlingit men carved alder into slats and rods, then lashed these pieces together to form sturdy, lightweight armor.

The Smithsonian Institution holds several really spectacular examples of the traditional Tlingit armor. I particularly love the Tlingit battle helmet beautifully carved from a very hard spruce burl. The helmet itself is shaped like a very fierce-looking (and tattooed) man’s head and would have been worn atop the fighter’s head. According to the Smithsonian notes, “it would have been “impossible to split open with a club.” (The two images accompanying this blog show other Tlingit armor from the collection of a Spanish museum.)

But back to my story. After seeing images of Tlingit war gear, I began to wonder how effective it was in battle against the Russians and their firearms. I knew that the Tlingit had put up a very strong fight against the Russians, even capturing their settlement, New Archangel, on Sitka Island in 1802. But an account of one battle in Carl Waldman’s book, Atlas of the North American Indian, really caught my attention.

In their attack on Russian-led forces in Prince William Sound, writes Waldman, the Tlingit “wore animal masks to protect their faces as well as chest armor of wooden slats lashed together with rawhide strips, which actually repelled Russian bullets.” (The italics are mine.)

I would never have guessed that well-made wooden armor could deflect a bullet. It looks to me as if we don’t give early armorers nearly enough credit.

Replicating the Armor of Alexander the Great

January 13, 2010

I think that there are few things more delightful and amusing to watch than an adventurous archaeologist in the act of trying replicate ancient drinks, hunting techniques, weapons, or other long vanished technologies. Who knew, for example, how punishingly difficult it was to chew one’s way through dozens of pounds of milled corn to make chicha, the beer of choice for the Inca and other Andean peoples? I had no idea until I began looking into the experiments of Penn State archaeologists Patrick McGovern and Clark Erickson and their associates at Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats.

Yesterday, I found a very intriguing YouTube video of the experiments that University of Wisconsin historian Gregory Aldrete and his student Scott Bartell conducted on linothorax, the ancient linen armor worn by Alexander the Great and his army. I wrote about their research on this remarkable kevlar like gear in my post yesterday, but seeing is really believing. Check this out.

Cloth, a Body Armor of Choice?

January 12, 2010

I think it’s safe to say that the ancient world is absolutely full of surprises. While most of us have long envisioned Alexander the Great donning a gleaming bronze cuirass for battle, new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America reveals that one of the greatest military generals in history and his soldiers favored a much humbler form of body armor–cloth.

Gregory Aldrete, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, and his student Scott Bartell, became interested in Alexander’s armor after collecting more than two dozen different classical descriptions of a type of cloth armor known as linothorax, made of linen. The Greek historian Plutarch, for example, describes Alexander’s gear on the day he headed into the famous Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C. and decisively defeated the forces of the Persian king Darius III. Alexander, says Plutarch, wore “a breastplate of folded (or doubled) linen.”

Intrigued by this, the two historians set out to replicate linothorax. They scrambled to find linen made from hand-harvested and woven flax, and then painstakingly glued the layers of linen together with two types of glue available in the ancient world –one made of rabbit skins and the other from flax seeds. The two historians then set up a kind of ancient firing range, shooting arrows and thrusting swords at the linothorax. “The laminated layers function like an ancient version of modern Kevlar armor,” Aldrete told a reporter from Discovery News, “using the flexibility of the fabric to disperse the force of the incoming arrow.”

What I find particularly fascinating is the fact that soldiers in both the Old and New World developed cloth armor. Aztec warriors, for example, wore a kind of quilted cloth-armor jacket or tunic known as ichcapuipilli for combat against the Spanish invaders. This battle gear consisted pieces of unspun cotton sandwiched between two layers of cotton: the armor measured nearly two fingers in thickness and, according to Ross Hassig’s fine book, Aztec Warfare, was capable of deflecting both arrowheads and atlatl darts.

Inca soldiers, too, wore a form of cloth armor. The attire couldn’t protect its wearer against cannon fire or Spanish steel swords, but it clearly had some advantages. It was comfortable, lightweight, and probably very cool in the heat of mid-day. So some 16th century Spanish soldiers themselves adopted it, wearing cotton armor into battle in the Andes.

Clearly, there is more to cloth than meets the eye.