Ending Civilization

TO A PHOTON, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. 

When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) 

Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.

The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core, it originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. But different latitudes on the molten star rotate at different rates—36 days at the poles, and only 25 days at the equator. 

Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. From afar, the resulting patches appear dark. They’re known as sunspots. Typically, the trapped matter cools, condenses into plasma clouds, and falls back to the surface in a fiery coronal rain. 

Sometimes, though, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires outward like a bullet.  READ MORE...

How Civilization Started

The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax.

Or so the prevailing story goes.

Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it.

Instead, multiple data sets covering several thousand years show this reigning theory is empirically flawed.

Even when some parts of the world adopted farming and began producing a surplus of food, it did not necessarily lead to complex hierarchies or tax-levied states.

Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape.

That's probably why cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice – rather than taro, yams, or potatoes – are at the root of virtually all classical civilizations. If the land was capable of cultivating grains, evidence shows it was much more likely to host complex societal structures.

"The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites," the authors of the hypothesis write.

"Roots and tubers, in contrast, are typically perennial and do not have to be reaped in a particular period, but once harvested are rather perishable."

In parts of South America, for instance, perennial root crops like cassava can be harvested all year round. Unfortunately, however, cassava rots easily and is difficult to transport.  READ MORE...

Not From Viking Civilization

The two Viksø helmets were found in pieces a bog in eastern Denmark in 1942. Archaeologists think they were deliberately deposited there as religious offerings. (Image credit: National Museum of Denmark)

Two spectacular bronze helmets decorated with bull-like, curved horns may have inspired the idea that more than 1,500 years later, Vikings wore bulls' horns on their helmets, although there is no evidence they ever did.

Rather, the two helmets were likely emblems of the growing power of leaders in Bronze Age Scandinavia.

In 1942, a worker cutting peat for fuel discovered the helmets — which sport "eyes" and "beaks" — in a bog near the town of Viksø (also spelled Veksø) in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen. The helmets' design suggested to some archaeologists that the artifacts originated in the Nordic Bronze Age (roughly from 1750 B.C. to 500 B.C.), but until now no firm date had been determined. The researchers of the new study used radiocarbon methods to date a plug of birch tar on one of the horn

"For many years in popular culture, people associate the Viksø helmets with the Vikings," said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But actually, it's nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East."

The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 B.C. — almost 3,000 years ago and many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region.

That dates the helmets to the late Nordic Bronze Age, a time when archaeologists think the regular trade of metals and other items had become common throughout Europe and foreign ideas were influencing Indigenous cultures, the researchers wrote in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.                  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...