5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

[Susano]

http://www.weirdworm.com/5-civilizations-that-just-disappeared/

 

Or, 5 possible civilizations for your PCs to discover.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Aargh! The usual suspects, again and again. Try these instead:

 

i) Tzintzuntzan. Was it really the largest empire in Mexico when Cortez arrived, perhaps the cradle of Mesoamerican civilisation? Did they really say to the conquistadores, "we'd like to become Spanish, just give us a hundred years to study for the exam," and gradually disappear into the mosaic of Colonial Mexican life? I guess.

ii) Kerkenes. What the heck? The largest pre-Hellenic city site in ancient Turkey was burned and abandoned just about the time that the first Greek historians were writing. Why didn't they mention it. And if they did mention it (as Pteria), are the Medes from down Persia-way the same as the Phyrgians, the ethnic first cousins of the Greeks? Is everything that Herodotus tells us about the Persian wars .... a lie? Dunh-dunh-dunh.

iii) Tell Afar. Look south from its citadel across the dry plain of the northern Iraqi jezirah. Admire the dry landscape, too arid for farming. And look at all the unexcavated mounds, hiding town sites from before the dawn of history (4500BC--3000BC). Who built them in such an unpromising place, and where did they go?

iv) Star Island: five miles off the coast of New Hampshire, on the lonely shoals, are the remains of fishing camps dating back to the early 1600s. We used to think that they were temporary settlements (which is what the Wikipedia article says). Now we know that that's a bit of an exaggeration, and that there were (semi-)permanent English settlers in New England more than a decade before Plymouth Colony. What the heck?

v) Srivijaya. Ever wonder why you never read about that big old island west of Java in ancient history classes? Because we don't actually know much about this big old empire. Just lost in time... Okay, maybe if they hadn't built in marshy lowlands we'd have a big old monument like the Borobudur, but that just makes you wonder how much ancient history has been lost in marshy lowlands. (Our buddy Herodotus puts the Pyramids about fifth in his list of the ancient wonders of Egypt. The more impressive ones were all built on either the banks of Lake Moersis, or the Delta, and have been lost...)

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Some more:

 

The Uruk Expansion: Named for the typesite of Uruk in southern Iraq, this is period (c. 3800/3500-3100) saw the expansion of Mesopotamian lifeways across a vast expanse of the Middle East. And we know this from huge, completely atypical "Uruk" style settlements built at various important communication nodes, mainly passes leading to the rivers, from Nineveh up to Tepe Arslan in southern Turkey. It is hard to call these settlements anything but colonies, and the fact that Uruk was such an atypically large city even for its area suggests a maximal explanation. We are looking at the legacy of a prehistoric empire, perhaps the world's first. Although other archaeologists plump for a polycentric explanation with multiple independent city states reaching out to trade with the rest of the world.

Two Uruk facts of interest. First, the Italian team excavating at Tepe Arslan has found a temple storeroom sealed by a wooden Yale lock (preserved in a waterlogged anaerobic environment like the wood of Seahenge?). That's probably because the notion that the Yale lock was invented in the 1800s is a crock, but feel free to throw in time travellers instead.

Second, and speaking of Pulp age time travellers, it is all too likely that the best Uruk colonial sites are underneath the Turkish dam reservoirs on the upper Euphrates. There was probably a great deal more to find in the 1930s, although it would have meant crossing the lawless Turkish border from the not-much-better Iraqi Mandate.

 

ii) And speaking of Nineveh, which was looted, I mean, excavated, by competing Nineteenth Century French and British expeditions, take a look at this story. A convoy of four barges and a raft carrying reliefs and sculptures (mainly from Sargon II's palace at Khorsabad, rather than Nineveh, if you want to get technical about it), harassed all the way down river by "Arab pirates" and ultimately largely sunk. Notice that this was the era, if not the excavator, that found and hopelessly jumbled up the 30,00 tablet Library of Assurbanipal. After Assurbanipal's death in about 627BC, all the peoples of the Middle East marched on Assyria together and brought down the empire that Sargon built and Assurbanipal maintained in ten years of relentless campaigning. What exactly was on that barge that required such desperate measures to drown in the Tigris?

 

iii) Amongst the great enemies overthrown by Sargon, Urartu, which was never the same again after the great Assyrian king sacked its main temple. It's an unlikely region for an empire, crammed up in the folded and refolded mountains between Turkey, Iran and Iraq, never before unified in a state, and still resisting any such thing today. Yet the Urartians overcame the limits of geography and built not only a powerful state, but an astonishing legacy of monumental architecture that testifies to their authority (and the skills of the war-captured slaves that built them). We would have known more about them, and earlier, were it not for the way that Kurdish bandits and early winter snowfalls in the passes used to do for adventurous Nineteenth Century archaeologists.

What was the secret of Urartu's power?* Did Sargon take it back to Khorsabad with him? Is it lying beneath Father Tigris river today? Well, duh.

 

 

*Probably control of some of the nearest good pasture land to the river valleys at a time when cavalry was just coming in, but never mind.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Anyway' date=' the Mayans were an incredibly advanced society believed to have the only complete written language in the pre-Columbian Americas. They were also renowned for their art, their architecture, and just being plain awesome. They were a brilliant, diverse civilization with more advancements than most other cultures in the world. And then, somehow, their entire civilization disappeared between the years 800 and 900 AD. There are some obvious theories as to what happened, including invading “explorers” wiping them out, famine, or maybe they just realized that since the end of the world was coming, they’d go ahead check out early.[/quote']

 

This is an old popular myth that's long been discredited; I'm surprised anyone still treats it seriously. Several of the major Mayan cities in the southern Mexican lowlands and Central America were indeed abandoned during this period. The most commonly-advanced explanation today is overpopulation, possibly combined with climate change, which left the cities unable to feed their inhabitants; although other causes have their supporters. However, a number of major Mayan cities in the highlands of the Yucatan Peninsula remained inhabited and prosperous up to the arrival of the Spaniards, maintaining their ancient traditional culture. Today millions of Mexicans are descended from the Mayas and still speak their languages.

 

A reasonable summary of Mayan history in this Wikipedia article.

[Markdoc]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

This is an old popular myth that's long been discredited; I'm surprised anyone still treats it seriously.

 

Ummmm.... this is in an article with Lemuria. Just sayin'

 

cheers, Mark

[DusterBoy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Yeah. . . just how seriously do you take an article which mentions Lemuria in the same breath as Angkor and the Mayans, throws in way too many pop cultural references and recycles the myth that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012?

[Susano]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Yeah. . . just how seriously do you take an article which mentions Lemuria in the same breath as Angkor and the Mayans' date=' throws in way too many pop cultural references and recycles the myth that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012?[/quote']

 

Who said anything about taking it seriously? I did post this to the Pulp Hero board, after all.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Lemuria not real? Say it ain't so!

Although I notice that the drilling programme has been pretty superficial, so there's no confirmation yet of the Third Root Race, crystal pyramids, or flying cars.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Okay, mea culpa. But in my defense,

 

Unlike the other civilizations on this list' date=' there’s actually no scientific basis for the continued belief that Lemuria ever actually existed.[/quote']

 

At least they didn't present their speculations about Lemuria as fact, as they did with the Mayas.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Okay, another one: no enigmatic ruins of lost cities, this time, just a huge historical mystery. They say that the winners get to write history. To be sure, but what if there are winners and winners, and each draft of history gets thinner and thinner as one winner after another drops out of the history-writing racket? I give you...

 

The Scottish Border

 

The Border between Scotland and England is one of the oldest delineated borders in the world. It's just not what you think it is. At least, it is not if you just started thinking about Hadrian's Wall, which does not follow the border first codified in law by the 1237 Treaty of York, and in fact runs far to its south in Northumberland, although it is very close to the border in the west, where it runs between Cumbria and Dumfriesshire.

 

Nor did the Treaty define the border. It just confirmed it. Now, this is one complicated border. It doesn't follow a river or any other major geographic feature. Rather, it will follow a river for a spell, then jump cross-country to another one, leaving all sorts of bits and pieces under-defined. Clearly it was laid out by some kind of boundary commission that couldn't get consenus on everything, and made some downright bizarre decisions.

 

But who, when? All we know for certain is that in 946AD, when Eadred, King of Wessex ravaged the north, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles says that he leased Cumbria Malcolm, King of Scots, and that "he reduced all Northumbria," and received the submission of the Scots. In 946, both Cumbria and Northumbria were aligned on a north-south axis that crossed the future border. Northumbria included Lothian, the Scottish region between the mountains and the sea up to the shoulder of the Firth of Forth, perhaps as far as Edinburgh, but certainly as far as Dunbar. Cumbria included both the English region and Dumfriesshire, and may have extended as far south as the corner where Wales and England meet the Irish Sea. Looking at the sources, we have several candidates for the changeover that turned Lothian and Dumfriesshire into parts of Scotland, but little or no idea what happened to Cumbria. All of these dates and events are debatable, and we still have no idea how the border came to be drawn as it was.

 

And that's hardly the start of the mystery:

i) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is Wessex propaganda. And, to make that even more problematic, it survives in a series of "local" editions, including a northern one that uses lost northern annals, but which has a political agenda that we cannot now discern. It is quite clear that the Chronicle exaggerates Eadred's accomplishments, and very likely that both Cumbria as well as Northumbria survived his raid. There is some evidence that Northumberland (that is, the very far northern chunk of England, more-or-less defined as the part between Hadrian's Wall and the border) still regarded itself as a separate kingdom in William the Conqueror's time.

 

ii) The other source we use is Simeon of Durham's History of the Church of Durham, composed around 1130AD, again with the aid of those lost northern annals. And Simeon's very blatant purpose is to promote Durham's "Cuthbertine" church's authority in the far north. And, as it happens, Saint Cuthbert of Durham has an honourable history as one of the saints "that are in the island of Lindisfarne," to the quote the mid-900s Lindisfarne Gospel.

 

Why does that raise my historical antennae? Because Eadred's 946 campaign in Northumbria was a classc relic-grab. He brought the remains of Aidan, another of the Lindisfarne saints, to Glastonbury, and burned Ripon Abbey. Simeon of Durham has a very interesting and elaborate story about how Cuthbert's remains got to Durham, according to which the monks of Lindisfarne heard that the Vikings were coming to get them in the late 800s, so they took Cuthbert's remains and headed off into the wilderness, where they hid in places such as Melrose Abbey, but also in the heath, like a bunch of guerillas. After which they wandered settled in (eventually) Durham, where in the early 1100s they opened the saint's stone coffin and found an eighth-century prayer book and bishop's robe.

 

Okay, let's stop and think about this. "The Vikings are coming! The Vikings are coming! No time to lose! Let's sling this huge stone catafalque over our shoulders and head out in the heather!"

"Brother Abbot-Bishop, I hear something sliding around inside this immensely heavy coffin. Shouldn't we fish it out, and maybe put the saint's remains in a more practical reliquary, while we're at it? Maybe not now, but at our first stop, anyway? Brother Abbot? What's wrong?"

Brother Abbot-Bishop: "Oh, crap. We forgot Saints Aidan and Oswin. Oh, well. No help for it now."

 

So we've got a problem with our sources. And if you think the English sources are bad, get a load of the Scottish ones. Not only do we have no history of early Scotland predating manuscripts prepared in the 1200s, we are committing a huge historical error in even talking about "Scotland," a word that we get from the title "King of the Scots," first used, as far as we know (from these sources) by Malcolm II (r. 1005--1034). The Malcolm with whom Eadred had his dealings called himself "King of Alba," and perhaps "King of the Picts." Scottish historical sources are terrible. We don't even know who the first Bishop of Saint Andrews was. (That's foreshadowing the "Lawnmower Boy's crazy theory" bit at the end, by the way.)

 

So, anyway, back up a bit: specifically, to the Venerable Bede, one of the smartest and nicest writers to come out of England, and certainly tops in his era of the mid-700s. Unfortunately, though, "smartest and nicest" doesn't necessarily mean "has no agenda." Bede is known to us for his Ecclesiatiscal History of the English, one of our best sources for the early history of England.

 

Again, though, it helps to look at a map and see where Bede's home monastery of Monkwearmouth on the river Jarrow. If you imagine England as a cast iron frying pan with all the weight on the pan, Bede lives way out at the end of the handle. It's a strange and vantage point for writing a history of England, and Bede brings the geography to an even stranger point by calling the place where he lives "Northumbria." Look at the map, and check out where the Humber is. It's like calling Maine "North Chesapeake," granted that scales are smaller where travel is harder. And notice this word, "Angles."

 

According to Bede, about two centuries before he wrote, a bunch of warriors from the continent came over to settle England's hash. There were "Jutes," from Jutland (Denmark), who settled in Kent. There were "Saxons" from north Germany, who settled in southwest England. Finally, Bede, right in the virtuous middle between Jutes and Saxons, there was the little shire of Angeln. And from Angeln came Ida, King of the Angles, who came ashore at the tidal island of Bamburgh (tidal island! Big juju! A liminal space between earth and water, life and death!) and declared himself King of Bernicia. Also, the guys who settled the bump of England way down south and east of the Fens, which we therefore call East Anglia, or Norfolk and Suffolk, these days.

 

Now, this is the kind of story that, even if it's true, is false. Bede has a few good sources for the century before his. He knows the date of an eclipse from the mid-600s, before that. But the 500s might as well be Middle Earth. What he really has is a copy of Gilda's c. 530 How God Totally Punished the British, And How They Totally Deserved It for Not Listening To Me . Gildas' point was that that the British Church had made God angry, so God sent over some "pagan" barbarian Roman allies to punish them. For Bede this is a story similar to the setting up of the Frankish kingdom, also one that sets up a contrast between the pagan-yet-Godly Anglo-Saxons, and the British, who are Christians-that-blew-it-with-God-and-have-it-coming-oh-yes-they-do.

 

And that is important because the key part of the story that Bede wants to tell is the arrival of Saint Augustine in Kent in 595. According to Bede, the English are pagans, England is a pagan land, and Saint Augustine has been sent by the Pope personally to see to its conversion. His mission has various adventures and has to deal with the might Redwaeld, a great and virtuous king of East Anglia who is also "overlord" of the island (south of the Humber) for a while, in spite of being a pagan. Here's a little statement of how English politics work, wrapped up in Bede's theology and sneaking in a point that he wants to get under the radar: that Humber border is something special.

 

Augustine is so successful that there gets to be an Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a "metropolitan," and sort of the chief of all the bishops of England, until the creation of the see of York to rule over the Church north of the Humber. Which, again, sets our historical antennae to waggling, because York had a bishop back in Roman days. In fact, Britain was fully Christianised back when it was Roman, and there is plenty of evidence that the place still had a functioning church in "English" as well as "British" areas in 595, including archaeological evidence that the bishop of York might still have been functional, and that Canterbury had a Christian church when Augustine arrived. We certainly have not sorted out how Canterbury came to be seen as the boss of the British bishops of people like the Bishop of Gwynedd in Bangor.

 

Of course, that's not what Bede is interested in. What he is interested in is how the arrival of priests associated with the Augustine mission in Northumbria set up a conflict with the local priests, who were all "descended" from the so-called Irish mission, missionaries from Iona in Scotland led by the blessed Saint Aidan, who set up at the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne just north of Bamburgh in 635AD. It was a knock-down battle between two versions of Christianity, divided by such weighty issues as the right way to cut a monk's hair and the date of Easter.

 

Without piling on more detail, can we unpack Bede's agenda? It seems to be a complicated one, mixing up religion and politics, bishops and kings, because the two are just not that far separate in his mind. The most reasonable way of understanding it, to my mind, is that there are actually four major political players in the north of England. They are the descendants of Ida at Bamburgh, who are Kings of Bernicia (Hadrian's Wall to Edinburgh). There is another coastal kingdom to the south, Deira. South and to the west of that is the archepiscopal seat of York, capital of the rich Vale of York. The archbishop there is by no means just an ecclesiastical official. He is a serious player for political power throughout the north. And, nipping across the narrow waist of England, there is Gwynedd in north Wales. The top of Mercia may obtrude here; or there may be an independent power centre in Cumbria-Dumfriesshire, or a kingdom called Rheged, or a power vacuum of minor states.

 

Bede's point is that Bernicia has a special glamour thanks to its ability to rule over the other powers in a united kingdom that stretches all the way down to "Northumbria." He has to acknowledge that other princes have done the same, including kings of Deira and Gwynedd, but his narrative marginalises all of them. Deira is weak, Gwynedd is a bunch of British bad Christians, and the Archbishop of York is weak and secondary to Canterbury and Lindisfarne.

But just because he says it, does not make it true. The easiest way to understand what happens next is that these power centres were never very strongly coupled, and they promptly uncouple. Rich York begins to hire Viking mercenaries to impose the archbishop's rule. Bernicia is marginalised, way out on the handle. How powerful and influential the descendants of Ida might have been between 730 and 946 we hardly know, because they do not issue any histories that survive in monasteries or cathedral libraries.

 

So what happens in Bernicia? At some point, the "kings of Northumbria" give way to the "earls of Bamburgh," in the person of Ealdred of Northumbria, whose father is Eadwulf, called a king by Irish annals, but earl of Bamburgh by a Saxon historian. Was he a descendant of Ida? We do not know. All we know is that Eadred was followed by his nephew, Uthred, who was assassinated by Cnute the Great, who gave one of his followers the Earldom of Northumberland; but in the north, the line of Ealdred was continued by Eadwulf. Late Scottish authorities say that it was Eadwulf who lost Lothian to Scotland in a battle in 1016, but while the battle happened, there is no evidence of this cession. What we do know is that there was a switchover from the "line of MacAlpine" to the "Line of Dunkeld" in the succession of the kings of Alba in the mid-1000s, after which there emerges an "Earl of Dunbar" who rules all of Lothian and claims a relationship with the Dunkelds and the old earls of Bamburgh.

 

The easiest, and highly speculative way to sort all of this out is to say that Bernicia was divided a final time to give Lothian to the line of Ida, and the south to the encroaching Saxon-Danes-Normans. And this was easy enough to accomplish, because in the confusion of the period, the line of Ida had married into the crown of (now) Scotland.

 

And why do we not know all this? Because Simon of Durham is lying to us about a fundamental point. The Cuthbertine church is not descended from Lindisfarne. It was a rival of Lindisfarne. The Bishop of Durham is not the Bishop of Lindisfarne, a new creation of the confused 900s, or perhaps a transference of the Bishop of Hexham. The Bishop of Lindisfarne went north, to Saint Andrews or to Dunbar, and the remains of Cuthbert lie at the original Melrose Abbey. That's why there is no clear record of this in ecclesiastical sources.

 

Now, I'm sure that the Earls of Dunbar remembered this and were proud of it, but their line came to an end in the mid-1300s. The entirety of the Scottish Clan Dunbar claims descent from that line, but, obviously, not its family records. Those are long gone. If we had them, would they tell us that the Kings of the Scots, Clan Dunbar, and the Percys of Northumberland were descended from Ida? It's a theory, at any rate.

 

So what we have here is three kingdoms and a proud descent, all lost to history. I've barely touched on Strathclyde, which may have been a bridge between north and South Celts for much longer than we realise, or even Bernicia. But we do have that border, carefully delineated on the ground by some medieval lawyers/surveyors whose names, efforts and dates are Lost To History.

 

So when those characters in the fantasy story have to track down the genealogies of lost kings in stone coffins and discover that the legitimate king is a shepherd up in the Highlands somewhere?

 

Sometimes, it might actually be true.

 

...And that's exactly one third of the writing I planned to get done today before heading for work. Someone needs to give me more time in the day.

[Cancer]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

You must spread some reputation around before giving it to Lawnmower Boy again.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Hey, look what I found!

http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk/Home.php

[AlHazred]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

I remember watching a show on History, where they had this beautiful 3D computer recreation of ancient Rome. I sat there thinking, "Why hasn't someone used this and other ancient city models for a Mythic Earth computer game? It would probably be an interesting MMO!"

 

Of course, that was years ago and I did nothing but sit on my butt, so it's not done. But the idea remains sound. (And, sadly, unused.)

[Lucius]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Someone should start a thread for civilizations that just mysteriously appeared

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Why is the palindromedary looking at me like that?

[L. Marcus]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

"... Hey, was this city here yesterday?"

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

I'm not sure that this is a perfect fit with the assignment, but this Spanish town's "Cyclopean" walls fascinated the Romans, who put a great deal of effort into trying to figure out who built it. The Romans weren't terribly good archaeologists, but they had all the books and inscriptions that we've lost, and they couldn't find anything.

And it's not like it's an enigmatic ruin, or anything. It was a flourishing city with impressive architecture and a long-established Roman history when Strabo asked the question, "so who founded this place?"

And no-one can say. Given the location, it is probably an eastern Mediterranean colony. The thing is that all of the colony-founding cities of the eastern shore had proud local historians who liked to list all of their city's foundations. If anything, there's an overclaiming issue. Yet here is a city, a Roman provincial capital, no less, that no-one claimed. I guess it must have just sprung up one day.*

 

 

My preferred explanation is that many of the colony-founding towns that we now know as Greek actually adopted Greek identities well after 500BC, and that this might be a case of a loss of cultural memory in the transition. However, that's just because I find the idea of an ancient Greek "colonisation" of the coast of Turkey an unnecessary hypothesis. It really doesn't go to the history of Spain very much at all.

[megaplayboy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

My superhero campaign's backstory has the island of Atlantis resurfacing circa 1930 or so. It looks like the Azores would be a good spot to put it, though I'm wondering how tough the inhabitants should be, since the plateau in the area is about 2 kilometers deep. That's about 200 atmospheres! Maybe it might be more "cinematic" in a pulp setting to put the depth at something a WW I era sub could reach? Which, after further research, was only about 100 meters. WW2 subs could do 200 meters safely, though, and some special diving stuff could do maybe 300.

I'm gonna peg it at 200 meters, so in that instance the pressure is about 20 atmospheres, I think, which is somewhat offset by water-breathing. That's also the deepest penetration possible for surface light, so it would make some sense to have that be the level at which an underwater civilization dwells. For convenience sake, there'll be some kind of sealed crystal bubble around the main city, permitting air-breathing(after all, they're prepping to resurface in a few years, right?). There might be a few burly fellows capable of truly deep diving, of that 2000+ meter variety.

[AlHazred]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Someone should start a thread for civilizations that just mysteriously appeared

Perhaps an outbreak of El Mal de Ciudades Fantasmales (or' date=' the [b']Malady of Ghostly Cities[/b], where afflicted individuals is transformed overnight into a city populated by phantoms)?(Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead's Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, page 248.)

[Susano]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Someone should start a thread for civilizations that just mysteriously appeared

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Why is the palindromedary looking at me like that?

 

Well, based on the contents of my fridge... it happened last night.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

My superhero campaign's backstory has the island of Atlantis resurfacing circa 1930 or so. It looks like the Azores would be a good spot to put it, though I'm wondering how tough the inhabitants should be, since the plateau in the area is about 2 kilometers deep. That's about 200 atmospheres! Maybe it might be more "cinematic" in a pulp setting to put the depth at something a WW I era sub could reach? Which, after further research, was only about 100 meters. WW2 subs could do 200 meters safely, though, and some special diving stuff could do maybe 300.

I'm gonna peg it at 200 meters, so in that instance the pressure is about 20 atmospheres, I think, which is somewhat offset by water-breathing. That's also the deepest penetration possible for surface light, so it would make some sense to have that be the level at which an underwater civilization dwells. For convenience sake, there'll be some kind of sealed crystal bubble around the main city, permitting air-breathing(after all, they're prepping to resurface in a few years, right?). There might be a few burly fellows capable of truly deep diving, of that 2000+ meter variety.

 

I see that spontaneous island formation is not unknown in the Azores, although being lifted by a volcano seems like it would be a little hard on urban infrastructure.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrina_Island_(Azores)

[Badger]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Okay, another one: no enigmatic ruins of lost cities, this time, just a huge historical mystery. They say that the winners get to write history. To be sure, but what if there are winners and winners, and each draft of history gets thinner and thinner as one winner after another drops out of the history-writing racket? I give you...

 

The Scottish Border

 

The Border between Scotland and England is one of the oldest delineated borders in the world. It's just not what you think it is. At least, it is not if you just started thinking about Hadrian's Wall, which does not follow the border first codified in law by the 1237 Treaty of York, and in fact runs far to its south in Northumberland, although it is very close to the border in the west, where it runs between Cumbria and Dumfriesshire.

 

Nor did the Treaty define the border. It just confirmed it. Now, this is one complicated border. It doesn't follow a river or any other major geographic feature. Rather, it will follow a river for a spell, then jump cross-country to another one, leaving all sorts of bits and pieces under-defined. Clearly it was laid out by some kind of boundary commission that couldn't get consenus on everything, and made some downright bizarre decisions.

 

But who, when? All we know for certain is that in 946AD, when Eadred, King of Wessex ravaged the north, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles says that he leased Cumbria Malcolm, King of Scots, and that "he reduced all Northumbria," and received the submission of the Scots. In 946, both Cumbria and Northumbria were aligned on a north-south axis that crossed the future border. Northumbria included Lothian, the Scottish region between the mountains and the sea up to the shoulder of the Firth of Forth, perhaps as far as Edinburgh, but certainly as far as Dunbar. Cumbria included both the English region and Dumfriesshire, and may have extended as far south as the corner where Wales and England meet the Irish Sea. Looking at the sources, we have several candidates for the changeover that turned Lothian and Dumfriesshire into parts of Scotland, but little or no idea what happened to Cumbria. All of these dates and events are debatable, and we still have no idea how the border came to be drawn as it was.

 

And that's hardly the start of the mystery:

i) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is Wessex propaganda. And, to make that even more problematic, it survives in a series of "local" editions, including a northern one that uses lost northern annals, but which has a political agenda that we cannot now discern. It is quite clear that the Chronicle exaggerates Eadred's accomplishments, and very likely that both Cumbria as well as Northumbria survived his raid. There is some evidence that Northumberland (that is, the very far northern chunk of England, more-or-less defined as the part between Hadrian's Wall and the border) still regarded itself as a separate kingdom in William the Conqueror's time.

 

ii) The other source we use is Simeon of Durham's History of the Church of Durham, composed around 1130AD, again with the aid of those lost northern annals. And Simeon's very blatant purpose is to promote Durham's "Cuthbertine" church's authority in the far north. And, as it happens, Saint Cuthbert of Durham has an honourable history as one of the saints "that are in the island of Lindisfarne," to the quote the mid-900s Lindisfarne Gospel.

 

Why does that raise my historical antennae? Because Eadred's 946 campaign in Northumbria was a classc relic-grab. He brought the remains of Aidan, another of the Lindisfarne saints, to Glastonbury, and burned Ripon Abbey. Simeon of Durham has a very interesting and elaborate story about how Cuthbert's remains got to Durham, according to which the monks of Lindisfarne heard that the Vikings were coming to get them in the late 800s, so they took Cuthbert's remains and headed off into the wilderness, where they hid in places such as Melrose Abbey, but also in the heath, like a bunch of guerillas. After which they wandered settled in (eventually) Durham, where in the early 1100s they opened the saint's stone coffin and found an eighth-century prayer book and bishop's robe.

 

Okay, let's stop and think about this. "The Vikings are coming! The Vikings are coming! No time to lose! Let's sling this huge stone catafalque over our shoulders and head out in the heather!"

"Brother Abbot-Bishop, I hear something sliding around inside this immensely heavy coffin. Shouldn't we fish it out, and maybe put the saint's remains in a more practical reliquary, while we're at it? Maybe not now, but at our first stop, anyway? Brother Abbot? What's wrong?"

Brother Abbot-Bishop: "Oh, crap. We forgot Saints Aidan and Oswin. Oh, well. No help for it now."

 

So we've got a problem with our sources. And if you think the English sources are bad, get a load of the Scottish ones. Not only do we have no history of early Scotland predating manuscripts prepared in the 1200s, we are committing a huge historical error in even talking about "Scotland," a word that we get from the title "King of the Scots," first used, as far as we know (from these sources) by Malcolm II (r. 1005--1034). The Malcolm with whom Eadred had his dealings called himself "King of Alba," and perhaps "King of the Picts." Scottish historical sources are terrible. We don't even know who the first Bishop of Saint Andrews was. (That's foreshadowing the "Lawnmower Boy's crazy theory" bit at the end, by the way.)

 

So, anyway, back up a bit: specifically, to the Venerable Bede, one of the smartest and nicest writers to come out of England, and certainly tops in his era of the mid-700s. Unfortunately, though, "smartest and nicest" doesn't necessarily mean "has no agenda." Bede is known to us for his Ecclesiatiscal History of the English, one of our best sources for the early history of England.

 

Again, though, it helps to look at a map and see where Bede's home monastery of Monkwearmouth on the river Jarrow. If you imagine England as a cast iron frying pan with all the weight on the pan, Bede lives way out at the end of the handle. It's a strange and vantage point for writing a history of England, and Bede brings the geography to an even stranger point by calling the place where he lives "Northumbria." Look at the map, and check out where the Humber is. It's like calling Maine "North Chesapeake," granted that scales are smaller where travel is harder. And notice this word, "Angles."

 

According to Bede, about two centuries before he wrote, a bunch of warriors from the continent came over to settle England's hash. There were "Jutes," from Jutland (Denmark), who settled in Kent. There were "Saxons" from north Germany, who settled in southwest England. Finally, Bede, right in the virtuous middle between Jutes and Saxons, there was the little shire of Angeln. And from Angeln came Ida, King of the Angles, who came ashore at the tidal island of Bamburgh (tidal island! Big juju! A liminal space between earth and water, life and death!) and declared himself King of Bernicia. Also, the guys who settled the bump of England way down south and east of the Fens, which we therefore call East Anglia, or Norfolk and Suffolk, these days.

 

Now, this is the kind of story that, even if it's true, is false. Bede has a few good sources for the century before his. He knows the date of an eclipse from the mid-600s, before that. But the 500s might as well be Middle Earth. What he really has is a copy of Gilda's c. 530 How God Totally Punished the British, And How They Totally Deserved It for Not Listening To Me . Gildas' point was that that the British Church had made God angry, so God sent over some "pagan" barbarian Roman allies to punish them. For Bede this is a story similar to the setting up of the Frankish kingdom, also one that sets up a contrast between the pagan-yet-Godly Anglo-Saxons, and the British, who are Christians-that-blew-it-with-God-and-have-it-coming-oh-yes-they-do.

 

And that is important because the key part of the story that Bede wants to tell is the arrival of Saint Augustine in Kent in 595. According to Bede, the English are pagans, England is a pagan land, and Saint Augustine has been sent by the Pope personally to see to its conversion. His mission has various adventures and has to deal with the might Redwaeld, a great and virtuous king of East Anglia who is also "overlord" of the island (south of the Humber) for a while, in spite of being a pagan. Here's a little statement of how English politics work, wrapped up in Bede's theology and sneaking in a point that he wants to get under the radar: that Humber border is something special.

 

Augustine is so successful that there gets to be an Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a "metropolitan," and sort of the chief of all the bishops of England, until the creation of the see of York to rule over the Church north of the Humber. Which, again, sets our historical antennae to waggling, because York had a bishop back in Roman days. In fact, Britain was fully Christianised back when it was Roman, and there is plenty of evidence that the place still had a functioning church in "English" as well as "British" areas in 595, including archaeological evidence that the bishop of York might still have been functional, and that Canterbury had a Christian church when Augustine arrived. We certainly have not sorted out how Canterbury came to be seen as the boss of the British bishops of people like the Bishop of Gwynedd in Bangor.

 

Of course, that's not what Bede is interested in. What he is interested in is how the arrival of priests associated with the Augustine mission in Northumbria set up a conflict with the local priests, who were all "descended" from the so-called Irish mission, missionaries from Iona in Scotland led by the blessed Saint Aidan, who set up at the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne just north of Bamburgh in 635AD. It was a knock-down battle between two versions of Christianity, divided by such weighty issues as the right way to cut a monk's hair and the date of Easter.

 

Without piling on more detail, can we unpack Bede's agenda? It seems to be a complicated one, mixing up religion and politics, bishops and kings, because the two are just not that far separate in his mind. The most reasonable way of understanding it, to my mind, is that there are actually four major political players in the north of England. They are the descendants of Ida at Bamburgh, who are Kings of Bernicia (Hadrian's Wall to Edinburgh). There is another coastal kingdom to the south, Deira. South and to the west of that is the archepiscopal seat of York, capital of the rich Vale of York. The archbishop there is by no means just an ecclesiastical official. He is a serious player for political power throughout the north. And, nipping across the narrow waist of England, there is Gwynedd in north Wales. The top of Mercia may obtrude here; or there may be an independent power centre in Cumbria-Dumfriesshire, or a kingdom called Rheged, or a power vacuum of minor states.

 

Bede's point is that Bernicia has a special glamour thanks to its ability to rule over the other powers in a united kingdom that stretches all the way down to "Northumbria." He has to acknowledge that other princes have done the same, including kings of Deira and Gwynedd, but his narrative marginalises all of them. Deira is weak, Gwynedd is a bunch of British bad Christians, and the Archbishop of York is weak and secondary to Canterbury and Lindisfarne.

But just because he says it, does not make it true. The easiest way to understand what happens next is that these power centres were never very strongly coupled, and they promptly uncouple. Rich York begins to hire Viking mercenaries to impose the archbishop's rule. Bernicia is marginalised, way out on the handle. How powerful and influential the descendants of Ida might have been between 730 and 946 we hardly know, because they do not issue any histories that survive in monasteries or cathedral libraries.

 

So what happens in Bernicia? At some point, the "kings of Northumbria" give way to the "earls of Bamburgh," in the person of Ealdred of Northumbria, whose father is Eadwulf, called a king by Irish annals, but earl of Bamburgh by a Saxon historian. Was he a descendant of Ida? We do not know. All we know is that Eadred was followed by his nephew, Uthred, who was assassinated by Cnute the Great, who gave one of his followers the Earldom of Northumberland; but in the north, the line of Ealdred was continued by Eadwulf. Late Scottish authorities say that it was Eadwulf who lost Lothian to Scotland in a battle in 1016, but while the battle happened, there is no evidence of this cession. What we do know is that there was a switchover from the "line of MacAlpine" to the "Line of Dunkeld" in the succession of the kings of Alba in the mid-1000s, after which there emerges an "Earl of Dunbar" who rules all of Lothian and claims a relationship with the Dunkelds and the old earls of Bamburgh.

 

The easiest, and highly speculative way to sort all of this out is to say that Bernicia was divided a final time to give Lothian to the line of Ida, and the south to the encroaching Saxon-Danes-Normans. And this was easy enough to accomplish, because in the confusion of the period, the line of Ida had married into the crown of (now) Scotland.

 

And why do we not know all this? Because Simon of Durham is lying to us about a fundamental point. The Cuthbertine church is not descended from Lindisfarne. It was a rival of Lindisfarne. The Bishop of Durham is not the Bishop of Lindisfarne, a new creation of the confused 900s, or perhaps a transference of the Bishop of Hexham. The Bishop of Lindisfarne went north, to Saint Andrews or to Dunbar, and the remains of Cuthbert lie at the original Melrose Abbey. That's why there is no clear record of this in ecclesiastical sources.

 

Now, I'm sure that the Earls of Dunbar remembered this and were proud of it, but their line came to an end in the mid-1300s. The entirety of the Scottish Clan Dunbar claims descent from that line, but, obviously, not its family records. Those are long gone. If we had them, would they tell us that the Kings of the Scots, Clan Dunbar, and the Percys of Northumberland were descended from Ida? It's a theory, at any rate.

 

So what we have here is three kingdoms and a proud descent, all lost to history. I've barely touched on Strathclyde, which may have been a bridge between north and South Celts for much longer than we realise, or even Bernicia. But we do have that border, carefully delineated on the ground by some medieval lawyers/surveyors whose names, efforts and dates are Lost To History.

 

So when those characters in the fantasy story have to track down the genealogies of lost kings in stone coffins and discover that the legitimate king is a shepherd up in the Highlands somewhere?

 

Sometimes, it might actually be true.

 

...And that's exactly one third of the writing I planned to get done today before heading for work. Someone needs to give me more time in the day.

 

I'll make it short the real explanation of the border?

 

 

Ancient district gerrymandering.

 

 

(not so) sorry, but i just had to go there.

[Old Man]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Another civilization that just disappeared was that of the United States of America in the late 20th century. Archaeological evidence suggests that the invention of TV, and especially reality TV and cable news, turned the citizenry into an apathetic culture that actively avoided education or democratic participation. They gradually ceded control of their country to ruling corporate and financial elites, who looted and enslaved them while keeping them distracted with American Idol and the Black Eyed Peas. Eventually this once-proud society became nothing more than a peasant class tightly controlled by a Dubai-based corporatized media that controlled all information and communication. Even their vaunted private gun ownership proved useless in the end, as the multinational corporate masters effortlessly kept them confused as to who to shoot.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

If you've ever driven through St. Louis (I haven't, but I gather that it's hard not to), you've been close to the biggest pyramid in the world. Or I think it's number one, but I'm not going to look it up, because it's kind of a cheat in that it's made of earth rather than stone, or masonry with a rubble infill, like the Great Pyramid at Giza or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, respectively.

 

Teotihuacan is a good comparison, though, because it is a veritable complex of pyramids, and Monk's Mound at Cahokia is only the largest of many, many mounds spreading south from Cahokia Creek just outside East St. Louis in what they used to call, in the days when St. Louis was sometimes called "Mound City," "the American Bottom." For some reason, though, some archaeologists have a hard time accepting that the largest community in pre-Columbian North America was inspired by a Mexican original (and probably Tollan rather than Teotihuacan, too.)

"The American Bottom" is an extensive zone of river bottomland that spreads south from the confluence of the Illinois and Missouri with the Mississippi to a gap some distance south. It's good farmland, although not the best around. And it is the easternmost extension of the prairie climate zone, with relatively low rainfall compared with the adjacent Illinois uplands. If we look at things from the point of view of a Stone Age corn farmer, it's actually pretty good land. It isn't much work to keep the trees down, and the soil has two things going for it that corn really needs: ample soil moisture in spring, and, because of the way the nitrogen cycle works, soil nitrates to fuel corn's explosive growth.

 

These seem like obvious reasons for the huge number of mounds at Cahokia, and adjacent locations such as East St. Louis and St. Louis proper, but that is not in fact the case. Settlement intensification begins centuries before corn becomes the major garden crop here. As far as we can tell, the technological trigger was the introduction of the bow and arrow.* Thinking about it, this is perhaps not a surprise. The bow and arrow may seem like a primeval tool, but in fact it requires some pretty careful crafting, even by comparison with a tool such as a prepared core. (A stone that has been preshaped so that you can just bang off a sharp shard whenever you need a knife.) Clearly, small roaming groups can keep themselves in bows and arrows, because the Inuit did so, but it is hardly clear that the Inuit were self-sufficient roaming hunters.

 

We know that the people who built Cahokia were Broad Spectrum producers. They'd mastered core reduction and utilised a wide range of resources, including especially riverine ones such as fish and marsh grasses. That's probably why they clustered around river sites to begin with. Once they had done that, they could specialise to the point of using bows and arrows. Once they had done that, they could manage their resources in a new way. You're hanging out, harvesting maygrass one day, when along comes a bison. Instead of having to gather up a hunting party and chasing the durn thing down while it bleeds out from an atlatl wound, you can maybe put an arrow into its jugular vein and --hey, it's barbecue time! Maybe. Anyway, the point is, wouldn't it be great if there were maygrass stands everywhere, so that instead of going to look for bison, they'd come looking for you?**

 

And it looks like that's what happened. As the bow and arrow becomes more generalised, as the river settlements bulk up, there start to be more bison on the east bank of the Mississippi. Of course, deer are a more important prey animal, but never mind. The point is, clear the land, plant the maygrass, shoot the bison. Only, at this point some wandering guy comes to camp and talks about the wonders of Teotihuacan, which, honest-to-Gosh, he's seen with his own eyes. (Which he hasn't, because Teotihuacan fell centuries ago.) Now, he's a pain. He hits on all the girls, for example. You'd kill him out behind the woodshed, but, a) he's big and tough and that might not work out too well, and he can play a flute, and he's teaching you how to do it, so that you can maybe pick up girls at the next Spring Rendezvous. It's happened before, but, this time, the chiefs and shamans are paying attention to the stories he tells about the huge stores of corn that the colleges store next their pyramids at Teotihuacan, and the big porridge feeds they hold there.

 

Next thing you know, the elders are pitching the local ceremonial mound/arena complex on the south side of Cahokia creek as the site of the 1050AD spring rendezvous. What have they got in mind? Well, the time comes round, and all the folk from everywhere about show up, and there are big cooking fires, and the girls start circulating around with more corn porridge than you've seen in your life! People trade stuff at Spring Rendezvous. That's what they do: hunters have hides and venison. Other people have dug up salt, or made prepared cores, or they've woven blankets. Whatever, but the chiefs have a plan. They have vision. They want people.

 

From a rational point of view, they want good gardeners to further expand their corn plantations, and stone axe makers, because more land needs to be cleared, and the saplings have to be kept down, and making and polishing an axehead is very laborious work. No-one lives at Cahokia. That's just not a concept that people have. People live one place at one time of the year, and another place at another time of the year. Cahokia is intended as a good place to be during the summer, when there's no game to be had and the corn is just growing, not much need for human intervention. Summer is a hungry time for those reasons, a good time not to stir, to spend all your time sitting in the shade, making stuff. Stuff like elaborately carved pipes, graven gorgets, elaborately painted pottery.....

 

Well, a few years later, the chiefs start missing people at the spring rendezvous. Long Spear is the best hunter hereabouts. Why isn't he here? The rumour is that he went to Aztlan, Wisconsin for Spring Rendezvous, skipping Cahokia entirely. What the heck? Someone tracks him down and asks him why. His reply was pretty discouraging. Aztlan got the big chunkey tournament this year, with the Corn Mother's own team.*** No-one cared about your bowl game. But what about our stuff, the envoy asked? Aztlan makes crap stuff, and not very much of it! Well, Long Spear replies, that's true. Their pottery and polished statues do wear out after a year or so. But, you know, it's not like we need that stuff to live. We need corn and salt venison to live, and that they've got at Aztlan. For that, all you need is cleared land for corn growing and luring deer and bison in.

 

So the elders at Cahokia decide that the next Spring Rendezvous will be a total blast. They'll put on singing and dancing and food, and, just to show that they're f--king serious, the biggest ritual sacrifice ever. Thirty pretty girls and two great warriors being strangled in public. Message: don't f--k with Cahokia. They also send a war party up to Aztlan.

 

And it works, kinda. Still, there aren't as many people as there are bowls of grit, blackened catfish, and barbecued venison short ribs. And the elders up on Monk's Mound notice that it's not just Wisconsin that's getting up in their business. It's the fraternity that runs the next mound over right there in Cahokia, which stages its own bowl game! So over the winter, they send a pretty clear message to the loser fraternity. They build a palisade that blocks off the view of the place. Message: we've got the axes, we've got the manpower. Our party will be the blast.

 

And it works, kinda, but only for a year, because next year, another fraternity gets into the act. They persuade the council to put through a sales tax, and spend the money on a huge calendarl circle over down that way, and stages a Burning Man revival in opposition to the bowl game, getting all the New Agers. And since your bowl game sucked, again, they got practically all the business.

 

Next year, it's not just spring rendezvous that's ill-attended. You have to notice that there's just not that many artisans in town, making stuff. They went off for Christmas holidays with the folks, and they just haven't come back. Crap. There's no-one to live in the wattle-and-daub Teotihuacan-style houses, and the amount of mana people are willing to pay for real estate is falling. Without mana to lend, the chiefs can't pay for corn and venison. People are starting to ask whether this "mana" exists at all. Maybe Cahokia's rituals don't produce mana at all. And if they don't, then why even bother coming here?

 

Some time around 1200AD, Cahokia fell. Not because it was burnt or overrun, but probably a civil war that was the sad consequence of people not caring anymore. Local centres all over the south flourished, with mound/shaman schools that threw big chunkey games with big barbecues, and leaders who presented themselves as military veterans. And slaves to do the gardening. Lots of slaves. Slaves don't ask for mana when they work. They ask to not be hit over the head again.

 

Then people started talking about a new, exciting source of goods up in the northeast, a place where you could get beads and blankets, just like they wore in Paris! And steel axes, which made it pretty pointless to stick around Cahokia creek, when there was better land up at Kaskaskia. So they built a new "capital of Indiana," as they put it (although the English and French spoke of the pays d'en haut more often than they used "Indiana" to designate Indian country, and of course they eventually split Indiana up into a bunch of states, including Illinois). Kaskaskia was swept away when the Mississippi changed its banks in 1881, although previous floods had long since reduced its importance, and it lost the capital in 1819 to Vandalia and now Springfield for reasons that I am sure that an Illinois historian could explain.

 

 

Anyway, today, Springfield flourishes like a three-faced pyramid, on the strength of real estate, consumer spending and big media. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

*Serious note: this is not uncontroversial, but I think that proponents of the idea that the Cascade point is an arrowhead have a lot of uphill work ahead of them.

 

**In your face, Jared Diamond with your zoological determinism!

 

 

***http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csGhMQoQms

[DusterBoy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

Of course it was. That's how it works. As soon as it shows up, it's always been there. It's a form of mind control that stops people from asking awkward questions.

 

And I believe the technical term is urbae vagantes. Akin to tabernae vagantes, only you need more real estate.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: 5 Civilizations That Just Disappeared

 

So, Britain has been under ice sheets a buncha times in the last half-million years or so. (Four hundred thousand? Eight hundred thousand? The point is, since the first Homo erectus showed up there.) Most of the stone tools of that era are thus found in glacial gravel deposits, void of context.

As to what kind of tools they are, the answer is obvious: "Acheulean" hand axes that evolved out of the older Olduowan technology about 1.8 million years ago, at about the same time that Erectus emerged from Homo habilis. The distinction is pretty clear. Olduwan tools are about as simple as stone tools can be: rounded pebbles from which flakes have been struck by hammer stones, creating short cutting surfaces on one side of the stone. Acheulean, in contrast, are smooth, symmetrical, bifacial ovoids created by a combination of hard and soft hammers. They have much longer cutting surfaces, but require careful planning and three-dimensional thinking to make. Modern archaeologists, who may or may not be as good at making them as your average Erectus, spend most of their manufacturing time turning the things over and over in their hands, trying to figure out where to strike next. Throughout the world, the Acheulean industry is inseparably associated with the near-global expansion of Erectus.

 

Except, well, in Britain, those glacial gravel deposits have yielded Olduwan tools, although because it just wouldn't be complicated enough to use that label, they are referred to as "Clactonian," after the findspot, Clacton on Sea. Now, we're pretty sure that H. habilis did not make it to England. We'd have to significantly revise our understanding of what habilis was capable of, in terms of adapting to cold weather climates, and also fill in the terrain between Africa and England. Some archaeologists propose a lost culture of Clactonian-tool-producing Erectus, perhaps because they had lost the cultural ability to make Acheulean tools. (Hence the relevance to this thread: with just a little, okay, a lot, of stretching, we get a "civilisation that just disappeared.") Others suggest that just because Erectus could make Acheulean tools doesn't mean that they sometimes banged out a Clactonian chopper because they needed one, and didn't have time to make a proper handaxe.

 

But, obviously, what really happened is that some small population of Erectus, cut off by the advancing ice, descended deep into the caves, where they eventually devolved into their ancestral habilis form. And, there, deep below the Earth, their descendants remain, gnawing at ancient organic matter preserved in the Coal Measures, except when a seam plays out and starvation strikes, and they climb to the surface to take an unwary sheep --or worse--, bundling the corpse below, and leaving one of their crude, but quite sufficiently murderous, tools behind.