I've heard of similar ones allowing the shooting of any Welshman within bowshot of the walls of either Chester or Shrewsbury after sunset. I think it's not clear that there were ever actual laws to this effect; if there were, they have almost certainly been repealed at some point as conflicting with the law on murder.
What amazes me most about this Marlborough Statute is that some of the rights it gives to tenants are still useful!That doesn't surprise me so much: I don't think the relationship between landlord and tenant has changed very much over time, even after 700 years. And we still rely on some of the rights from Magna Carta which is almost 800 years old.
What may be the world's oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham.
Radiocarbon dating found the manuscript to be at least 1,370 years old, making it among the earliest in existence.
The pages of the Muslim holy text had remained unrecognised in the university library for almost a century.
Better teeth than modern day British. ;D
Archaeologists in Egypt have made an exciting tomb discovery - the final resting place of a high priest, untouched for 4,400 years.
Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, described the find as "one of a kind in the last decades".
The tomb, found in the Saqqara pyramid complex near Cairo, is filled with colourful hieroglyphs and statues of pharaohs. Decorative scenes show the owner, a royal priest named Wahtye, with his mother, wife and other relatives.
Archaeologists will start excavating the tomb on 16 December, and expect more discoveries to follow - including the owner's sarcophagus.
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Archaeologists in Mexico say they have made an important discovery, uncovering a temple to Xipe Tótec - the pre-Hispanic "Flayed lord".
Historically, throughout the region, priests paid tribute to the deity by wearing the skin of human sacrifices.
Items relating to the deity were discovered at a site in Puebla state, and believed to date from 900-1150 AD.
Mexican archaeologists say the find may be the earliest dedication to Xipe Tótec discovered in Mexico.
Worship of the God, who represents fertility and regeneration, is known to have later spread throughout Mesoamerica during Aztec times.
In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a “baris”.
For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A “fabulously preserved” wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.
“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right,” said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation’s findings. “What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.”
The remains of the timber structure, which would have measured about 13ft (4m) square and 5ft (1.5m) deep, housed some 40 rare and precious artefacts.
Among them was a lyre - an ancient harp - and a 1,400-year-old box thought to be the only surviving example of painted Anglo-Saxon woodwork in Britain.
Gold coins, the gilded silver neck of a wooden drinking vessel, decorative glass beakers and a flagon believed to have come from Syria were also found.
DNA study reveals Ireland's age of 'god-kings'
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DNA has been used to confirm the existence of an elite social class in the Stone Age inhabitants of Ireland.
It's one of the earliest examples of such a hierarchy among human societies.
A key piece of evidence comes from an adult male buried at the 5,000-year-old Newgrange monument; his DNA revealed that his parents were first-degree relatives, possibly brother and sister.
He was one member of an extended "clan" that was buried at impressive stone monuments across Ireland.
Ancient Americans made epic Pacific voyages
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New evidence has been found for epic prehistoric voyages between the Americas and eastern Polynesia.
DNA analysis suggests there was mixing between Native Americans and Polynesians around AD 1200. The extent of potential contacts between the regions has been a hotly contested area for decades. In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a journey by raft from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate the voyage was possible.
Until now, proponents of Native American and Polynesian interaction reasoned that some common cultural elements, such as a similar word used for a common crop, hinted that the two populations had mingled before Europeans settled in South America. Opponents pointed to studies with differing conclusions and the fact that the two groups were separated by thousands of kilometres of open ocean.
Alexander Ioannidis from Stanford University in California and his international colleagues analysed genetic data from more than 800 living indigenous inhabitants of coastal South America and French Polynesia. They were looking for snippets of DNA that are characteristic of each population and for segments that are "identical by descent" - meaning they are inherited from the same ancestor many generations ago.
"We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands," said Mr Ioannidis. "It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event."
Rest of article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53338203
Yeah, I think to some extent he just ended up with a ton of pressure from his stuff getting too big: he had huge numbers of social media followers and I think he got dragged down by it as well as that making him much more unnerved about older bits of his work being so widely read. It is definitely a pity.Oh wow again there is a whole story happening on closed social media where I can't follow it. It is just a headache. I wish that when people leave the real Internet they would leave a note why and a forwarding address.
Yeah, archaeogenetics is something we need more people doing, though we also really need good people doing it because I really don't want to think about what some historians would try doing with those methodologies...
Not sure if this is really history or science, but it's interesting either way - the 1940s British design for a space-suit which was never used (and might well not have worked) but someone did build one more recently. And whatever its actual capabilities, it looks *fantastic*. It even has a cape!
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfjHPLTWoAAaNH-?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)
More info at:
https://spacecentre.co.uk/blog-post/the-bis-lunar-spacesuit/
I'm not sure that counts as a yay! But yes, it's a pity, I think Dayanna is great and it's disappointing that we can't get these sorts of community efforts better funded. I'm not sure that seeing things as pitched too high for one's fundraising capacity is the right way to consider it - you have to pitch events at the level needed to actually fund them, and see where you can get your fundraising capacity (which is a function of the project itself, personal linkages, institutional access, and a lot of luck) in light of that. I am one of the backers, anyhow, and I hope it'll inspire future efforts even if failing this time round.The serial crowdfunding people I know describe it as a "fists get you a brick, brick gets you a knife, knife gets you the keys" situation: you create a series of projects, each calibrated so that you are confident your audience will fund it and probably reach the stretch goals, and use each project to build your audience so you can propose more expensive projects. As always, I describe the best practices of people with demonstrated success in an area as far as I understand them, not the only way of doing things.
Nearly twenty years ago, I read to the Dublin Mediaeval Society a paper entitled "Hengest and the Jutes". Later, in conversation with colleagues, I discovered that nearly all my conclusions had been anticipated many years previously in lectures by the late Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, which I had not heard; it was therefore impossible for me to publish my paper. On my next visit to Tolkien, in 1966, I explained the situation to him; a few days later, he wrote to me offering, with characteristic generosity, to hand over to me all his material on the story of Finn and Hengest, to make what use of it I wished.
Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.
And it does seem like the analysis involves people from many different specialties, its not "a physicist has reinvented the field of epidemic modelling" or "a biologist has reinvented historical linguistics."Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.
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