In 2003, workers building a highway through a small township in Ireland chanced upon a long-lost medieval graveyard.
Of the roughly 1,300 bodies found at the site near the township of Ballyhanna, a couple of the ancient interred stood out. Their bones were riddled with benign tumors caused by a rare disease, but for strangely different reasons.
Both of the individuals appeared to have a genetic condition known as multiple osteochondromas, which causes painful yet typically non-malignant tumors to grow in bone, leading to limb deformity, postural issues, or nerve damage over time.
Today we know the disease is far from common, occurring on a roughly one in 50,000-person basis. Finding two bodies with the condition in such a small graveyard is quite the coincidence, especially since a genome analysis on the remains published in the European Journal of Human Genetics finds the two men who left the bones weren’t closely related.
In fact, their lives in this small Irish parish were separated by several centuries.
“We made several assumptions about these two men when we first realized that they both had suffered from multiple osteochondromas,” explains archaeologist Eileen Murphy from Queen’s University Belfast, a senior author on the study.
“We assumed they were contemporary but radiocarbon dating showed they were separated by several hundred years. We also assumed they were related but the new [ancient DNA] analysis has demonstrated that this is not the case.”
None of the skeletons unearthed at the Ballyhanna’s lost graveyard look like they were in particularly good health when they died. Some show evidence of tuberculosis or rickets.
But the bones of the two men with bony outgrowths were in particularly poor health.
Archaeologists suspect the graveyard was once part of a lower class Gaelic medieval community that included men, women, and children. Some individuals were probably very poor, while others worked as farmers, laborers, merchants, artisans, or clergy.
The discovery of two unrelated men with the same rare bone disease in such a small community is unusual in itself, and it gets even stranger.
Despite their similar appearances, the recent analysis revealed the two cases of multiple osteochondroma weren’t even caused by the same genetic mutation.
The individuals both showed changes in the EXT1 gene, which has been linked to multiple osteochondromas. But one of the mutations has never been seen in modern patients.
The first man had a missense mutation in a part of his EXT1 gene, whereby a single nucleotide base was swapped for another, scrambling the encoded sequence for the protein. It has been previously identified in at least three modern patients with multiple osteochondromas.
The second man showed a premature stop message in the same gene that has not yet appeared in modern sequencing data of patients with the disease.
The individual with the novel mutation died at a younger age, around 18 to 25, and showed deformities in his hips, knees, ankle, and forearm. He lived sometime between 1031 and 1260 CE.
The individual that died at an older age, around 30 or 40, had less pronounced tumors but they were evident throughout his skeleton. He lived between 689 and 975 CE.
“It was really surprising that these individuals had completely different mutations causing their condition, especially because it’s so rare,” says geneticist and first author Iseult Jackson from Trinity College Dublin.
The discovery just goes to show how much modern DNA analysis can reveal about diseases that have been with us for millennia.
“The study demonstrates the important contribution that ancient DNA analysis on people from the past can make to understanding conditions that still affect people today,” says Trinity College Dublin geneticist, Dan Bradley.
The study was published in the European Journal of Human Genetics.
More than 2,100 years ago, Greek astronomer Hipparchus mapped out the stars — and for a long time, his document had been considered humanity’s earliest attempt to assign numerical coordinates to stellar bodies. But despite its fame, the treatise was only known to exist through the writings of another well-known astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy, who compiled his own celestial inventory some 400 years later.
Until now, that is.
Researchers believe they’ve found fragments of Hipparchus’ lost historical document hidden in a medieval manuscript.
“This new evidence is the most authoritative to date and allows major progress in the reconstruction of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue,” reads a study on the find published in the journal History of Astronomy last week. The discovery could shed new light not only on Hipparchus’ attempt to map the night sky through precise measurements and calculations, but on the history of astronomy.
Hipparchus, who’s also known as the father of trigonometry, is often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece. Parts of his star map appear to have shown up in the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a book of Syriac texts written in the 10th or 11th centuries whose parchment pages were erased so they could be reused (a common recycling practice at the time), but still bear visible traces of their earlier form. This particular palimpsest came from the Greek Orthodox Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, now owns most of the Codex’s folios.
Multispectral imaging reveals the enhanced Greek undertext in red below the black Syriac overtext.
Museum of the Bible
Teams from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California and the Lazarus Project based at the Rochester Institute of Technology revealed the obscured text and measurements using many wavelengths of light, a technique known as multispectral imaging.
Researchers from Sorbonne Universite and the University of Cambridge were then able to decipher the descriptions of four constellations. Not only did this seem to unveil Hipparchus’ cartography, but the team also says the newly revealed numerical evidence is highly consistent with real stellar coordinates.
This would make Hipparchus’ Catalogue more accurate than Ptolemy’s much later Almagest astronomy handbook, though the researchers acknowledge they’re working with a small sample and that significant errors could exist in parts of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue that haven’t survived or been uncovered yet.
The scientists say the Codex Climaci Rescriptus could still reveal even more of Hipparchus’ stellar observations.
Cutting-edge digital technologies continue to recover vital bits of cultural heritage on documents the human eye can’t see due to damage, deterioration or deliberate erasure.
Multispectral imaging has resurrected text from the oldest known copies of writings by ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. It’s revealed secrets of scrolls damaged in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and exposed elements of the Dead Sea Scrolls, historically significant biblical fragments recovered from caves in Qumran, Israel.
A simulation called “Plan A” produced by researchers shows how the use of one so-called tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon could lead to a terrifying worldwide conflict.
In the roughly four-minute video, a Russian “nuclear warning shot” at a US-NATO coalition is followed by a tactical nuke that leads to a global nuclear war.
The video was produced war at a time of heightened tensions between Russia and NATO, which have again found themselves at odds over a worsening war in Ukraine.
Visit Business Insider’s home page for more stories.
More than 91 million people in Russia, the US, and other NATO countries might be killed or injured within three hours following a single “nuclear warning shot,” according to a terrifying simulation.
The simulation is called “Plan A,” and it’s an audio-visual piece that was first posted to to YouTube on September 6, 2019. Researchers at the Science and Global Security lab at Princeton University created the animation, which shows how a battle between Russia and NATO allies involving the use of a so-called low-yield or “tactical” nuclear weapons — which can pack a blast equivalent to if not greater than the atomic bombs the US used to destroy Hiroshima or Nagasaki in World War II — might feasibly and quickly snowball into a global nuclear war.
“This project is motivated by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans. The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years,” the project states on its website.
The video has an ominous, droning soundtrack and a digital map design straight out of the 1983 movie “WarGames.” The Cold War-era movie, in which a young Matthew Broderick accidentally triggers a nuclear war, “was exactly the reference point,” simulation designer Alex Wellerstein told Insider.
But while simulations can be frightening, they can also be incredibly helpful. Governments can use them to develop contingency plans to respond to nuclear disasters and attacks in the least escalatory way, and they can also help ordinary citizens learn how to survive a nuclear attack.
“Plan A” was released as tensions between Russia and NATO allies and as Russia and the US were testing weapons previously banned under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Russia’s war against Ukraine has once against put Russia and NATO at odds, with concerns growing that the war could see the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine or expand into a broader conflict that goes nuclear.
The following shows how a NATO-Russia conflict involving a nuclear warning shot and the use of a tactical nuclear weapon could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear war.
More than 2,100 years ago, Greek astronomer Hipparchus mapped out the stars — and for a long time, this had been considered humanity’s earliest attempt to assign numerical coordinates to stellar bodies. But despite its fame, the treatise was only known to exist through writings of another ancient astronomer named Claudius Ptolemy, who compiled his own celestial inventory some 400 years later.
Until now, that is.
Researchers believe they’ve found fragments of Hipparchus’ lost, historical document hidden in a book of medieval Greek manuscripts.
“This new evidence is the most authoritative to date and allows major progress in the reconstruction of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue,” reads a study on the find published in the journal History of Astronomy this week. The discovery could shed new light on the history of astronomy.
Hipparchus, who’s also known as the father of trigonometry, is often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece. Parts of his star map appear to have shown up in the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a book of Syriac texts in which parchment pages were erased so they could be written on again, but still bear visible traces of their earlier form. This particular palimpsest is housed at the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
Multispectral imaging reveals the enhanced Greek undertext in red below the black Syriac overtext.
Museum of the Bible
Teams from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and the Lazarus Project based at the Rochester Institute of Technology revealed the erased text and numbers using different wavelengths of light, a technique known as multispectral imaging.
Researchers from Sorbonne Universite and the University of Cambridge were then able to decipher the descriptions of four constellations. Not only did this seem to unveil Hipparchus’ cartography, but the team also says the newly revealed numerical evidence is highly consistent with real stellar coordinates.
This would make Hipparchus’ Catalogue more accurate than Ptolemy’s much later version, though the researchers acknowledge they’re working with a small sample and that significant errors could exist in parts of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue that haven’t survived.
As cutting-edge digital technologies continue to recover vital bits of cultural heritage lost to damaged and deteriorating documents or deliberate erasure, the scientists say the Codex Climaci Rescriptus could yet reveal even more of Hipparchus’ stellar observations.
Scholars may have just discovered a fragment of the world’s oldest complete star map.
The map segment, which was found beneath the text on a sheet of medieval parchment, is thought to be a copy of the long-lost star catalog of the second century B.C. Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who made the earliest known attempt to chart the entire night sky. The fragment was concealed beneath nine leaves, or folios, of the religious Codex Climaci Rescriptus at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The codex is a palimpsest, meaning the original writings have been scraped from their parchment to make way for a collection of Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts telling stories from the Old and New Testaments. The researchers thought that even earlier Christian texts were buried beneath the pages, but multispectral imaging revealed something more surprising: numbers stating, in degrees, the length and width of the constellation Corona Borealis and coordinates for the stars located at its farthest corners. The researchers published their findings Oct. 18 in the Journal for the History of Astronomy (opens in new tab).
“I was very excited from the beginning,” study lead researcher Victor Gysembergh (opens in new tab), a science historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, told Nature (opens in new tab). “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
Related: Scientists unlock the ‘Cosmos’ on the Antikythera Mechanism, the world’s first computer
The researchers’ excitement grew when the precise coordinates enabled them to estimate the date when the coordinates were written down — roughly 129 B.C. when Hipparchus was a veteran astronomer puzzling over the night skies.
Historically referred to as the “father of scientific astronomy,” Hipparchus (circa 190 B.C. to 120 B.C.) spent much of his later years making astronomical observations from the island of Rhodes. Not much documentation of his life remains, but historical texts credit him with a number of impressive scientific advances, such as accurately modeling the motions of the sun and the moon; inventing a brightness scale to measure the stars; further developing trigonometry; and possibly inventing the astrolabe, a handheld disc-shaped device that can calculate the precise positions of the heavenly bodies.
In 134 B.C., Hipparchus saw something surprising in the night sky: In a patch of previously empty space, a new star had winked into existence.
The “movement of this star in its line of radiance led him to wonder whether this was a frequent occurrence, whether the stars that we think to be fixed are also in motion,” Pliny the Elder, a famed naturalist and military commander of the early Roman Empire, wrote in his book “Natural History.” “And consequently he did a bold thing, that would be reprehensible even for God — he dared to schedule the stars for posterity, and tick off the heavenly bodies by name in a list, devising machinery by means of which to indicate their several positions and magnitudes…”
St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, the sixth-century monastery where the map fragment was found. (Image credit: Jon Sellers / Alamy Stock Photo)
Hipparchus went on to catalog roughly 850 stars across the night sky, noting their precise locations and brightnesses. By comparing his complete star chart with more fragmentary measurements of individual stars taken by past astronomers, Hipparchus realized that the distant stars had appeared to move 2 degrees from their original positions.
He correctly concluded the reason for the shift in the stars’ apparent positions: Earth was slowly precessing, wobbling on its axis like a spinning top, at a rate of 1 degree every 72 years. Though references to Hipparchus’ famed catalog survive — notably engraved on the globe (opens in new tab) held atop the shoulders of a second-century Italian marble sculpture called the Farnese Atlas — it, and its copies, had been lost until now.
The researchers took 42 photographs of each of the nine pages across a broad range of wavelengths before scanning the photos with computer algorithms that picked out the text hidden underneath. Then, after reading the coordinates from the chart fragments, the scholars used the same idea of Earth’s planetary precession that had sprung from the chart to identify it. Reversing time, they wound the stars of the Corona Borealis back to the year when the luminaries shone in the sky at the exact spot the hidden writing described.
The date of the stars’ original recording was in 129 B.C., next the researchers had to find when the writing was done. By dating the nine folios according to palaeography — the study of identifying points in history by their distinct writing styles — the scholars placed them in the 5th or 6th Century A.D.; making them copies of Hipparchus’ catalog that were still being used more than 700 years later.
By comparing their wound-back night sky to a separate medieval Latin manuscript called Aratus Latinus, long believed to contain a partial copy of Hipparchus’ original catalog, the researchers confirmed that the Aratus manuscript’s coordinates for the constellations Draco, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor also landed on 129 B.C., providing compelling indirect evidence that the newfound fragment originated from the same source as the manuscript.
“The new fragment makes this much, much clearer,” Mathieu Ossendrijver (opens in new tab), a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin, told Nature. “This star catalog that has been hovering in the literature as an almost hypothetical thing has become very concrete.”
To continue the investigation, the researchers hope to improve their imaging techniques and scan more of the codex. Most of the manuscript’s 146 folios are currently owned by American billionaire and Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green and displayed in his Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. In 2021, Hobby Lobby was forced to surrender 17,000 smuggled artifacts, originally looted from Iraq during the Iraq War, to federal authorities.
Aside from the codex itself, the researchers think additional pages from the star catalog may be hiding inside the more than 160 palimpsests at St. Catherine’s Monastery. Past efforts have already led to the discovery of previously unknown Greek medical texts, which include surgical instructions, recipes for drugs and guides to medicinal plants.
Editor’s note: Updated at 10 a.m. EDT to clarify that the Hipparchus’ star map is not the oldest star map on record, but the oldest complete star map on record. The honor of the oldest star map goes to an ancient Egyptian star map that was painted in a tomb about 3,500 years ago.
Enlarge / Multispectral imaging revealed hidden original text from St. Catherine’s Monastery over the top of faint tracings on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus palimpsest.
Museum of the Bible/Keith T. Knox/Emanuel Zingg
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is often called the “father of astronomy.” He’s credited with discovering the Earth’s precession (how it wobbles on its axis), and calculating the motions of the Sun and Moon, among other achievements. Hipparchus was also believed to be compiling a star catalog—perhaps the earliest known attempt to map the night sky to date—sometime between 162 and 127 BCE, based on references in historical texts.
Scholars have been searching for that catalog for centuries. Now, thanks to a technique called multispectral imaging, they have found what seems to be the first known Greek remnants of Hipparchus’ star catalog. It was hidden beneath Christian texts on medieval parchment, according to a new paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Multispectral imaging is a method that takes visible images in blue, green, and red and combines them with an infrared image and an X-ray image of an object. This can reveal minute hints of pigment, as well as hidden drawings or writings underneath various layers of paint or ink. For instance, researchers have previously used the technique to reveal hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously believed to be blank. And last year, Swiss scientists used multispectral imaging to reconstruct photographic plates created by French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who pioneered color photography and snagged the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts. The method corrected for distortions of color that occurred as a result of Lippmann’s technique.
The current paper arose from research into the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a palimpsest that originated at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It consists of 11 individual manuscripts, with Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament and Greek text of the New Testament, among other content. Those texts have been dated to the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, respectively. The codex was kept at Westminster College in Cambridge until 2010, when Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, purchased it from Sotheby’s. It’s now part of the Green Collection on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, although a few folios are stored elsewhere.
Enlarge / The palimpsest was discovered at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
Getty Images
It was common practice at the time to scrape clean old parchment for reuse, and that’s what was done with the codex. Initially, scholars assumed the older writing was more Christian texts. But when Peter Williams, a biblical scholar at Cambridge University, asked his summer students to study the pages as a special project back in 2012, one of them identified a Greek passage by the astronomer Eratosthenes.
That warranted further investigation, so Williams turned to scientists at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California and the University of Rochester in New York to conduct multispectral imaging of the pages in the codex in 2017. The technique revealed a full nine folios pertaining to astronomy, dating to between the 5th and 6th centuries—not just the Eratosthenes passage about star origin myths, but also a famous poem (Phaenomena, circa 3rd century BCE) describing constellations.
Williams spent a good portion of his time during the pandemic lockdown studying the resulting images, and one day he noted what seemed to be the coordinates of the constellation Corona Borealis. He promptly contacted science historian Victor Gysembergh of CNRS in Paris about his discovery. “I was very excited from the beginning,” Gysembergh told Nature. “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
Codex Climaci Rescriptus in the Museum of the Bible’s Green Collection, featuring the Gospel of Matthew 21:27–31.”>
Enlarge / A leaf from the 6th century CE Codex Climaci Rescriptus in the Museum of the Bible’s Green Collection, featuring the Gospel of Matthew 21:27–31.
Gysembergh and his colleague Emanuel Zingg of Sorbonne University translated the one-page passage as follows:
Corona Borealis, lying in the northern hemisphere, in length spans 9°¼ from the first degree of Scorpius to 10°¼ in the same zodiacal sign (i.e. in Scorpius). In breadth it spans 6°¾ from 49° from the North Pole to 55°¾.
Within it, the star (β CrB) to the West next to the bright one (α CrB) leads (i.e. is the first to rise), being at Scorpius 0.5°. The fourth star (ι CrB) to the East of the bright one (α CrB) is the last (i.e. to rise) [. . .]10 49° from the North Pole. Southernmost (δ CrB) is the third counting from the bright one (α CrB) towards the East, which is 55°¾ from the North Pole.
But could this passage be attributed to Hipparchus? While they are cautious about making a definitive attribution, the authors cite several pieces of evidence that seem to link the text to the Greek astronomer. For instance, some of the data are recorded in an unusual manner consistent with the only other surviving work of Hipparchus. And the authors were able to use astronomical charts to determine that the observations recorded in the text were probably made around 129 BCE, when Hipparchus would have been working on his catalog.
So far, only the coordinates for Corona Borealis have been recovered, but the researchers believe it’s quite likely Hipparchus mapped the entire night sky at some point, including all the visible stars—just like Ptolemy did in his later Almagest treatise. Many scholars believe Hipparchus’ catalog was one of the sources Ptolemy used when compiling his treatise.
In fact, Williams et al. found that Hipparchus’ calculations of coordinates were actually much more accurate than Ptolemy’s—correct to within one degree. This was an astonishing feat, given that the telescope had not yet been invented. They surmise Hipparchus probably used a sighting tube called a dioptra or an armillary sphere to make his calculations. And they hope that other portions of the lost star catalog might yet be found lurking in the monastery’s library as imaging techniques continue to improve.
DOI: Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2022. 10.1038/d41586-022-03296-1 (About DOIs).
Listing image by Museum of the Bible, 2021/CC BY-SA 4.0
A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.
Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy1. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.
The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.
The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. Researchers at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the University of Rochester in New York took 42 photographs of each page in varying wavelengths of light, and used computer algorithms to search for combinations of frequencies that enhanced the hidden text.
Star signs
Nine folios revealed astronomical material, which (according to radiocarbon dating and the style of the writing) was probably transcribed in the fifth or sixth centuries. It includes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-bc poem called Phaenomena, which describes the constellations. Then, while poring over the images during a coronavirus lockdown, Williams noticed something much more unusual. He alerted science historian Victor Gysembergh at the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris. “I was very excited from the beginning,” says Gysembergh. “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
The surviving passage, deciphered by Gysembergh and his colleague Emmanuel Zingg at Sorbonne University in Paris, is about a page long. It states the length and breadth in degrees of the constellation Corona Borealis, the northern crown, and gives coordinates for the stars at its extreme north, south, east and west.
Several lines of evidence point to Hipparchus as the source, beginning with the idiosyncratic way in which some of the data are expressed. And, crucially, the precision of the ancient astronomer’s measurements enabled the team to date the observations. The phenomenon of precession — in which Earth slowly wobbles on its axisby around one degree every 72 years — means that the position of the fixed stars slowly shifts in the sky. The researchers were able to use this to check when the ancient astronomer must have made his observations, and found that the coordinates fit roughly 129 bc — during the time when Hipparchus was working.
Until now, says Evans, the only star catalogue that had survived from antiquity was one compiled by astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century ad. His treatise Almagest, one of the most influential scientific texts in history, set out a mathematical model of the cosmos — with Earth at its centre — that was accepted for more than 1,200 years. He also gave the coordinates and magnitudes of more than 1,000 stars. However, it is mentioned several times in ancient sources that the person who first measured the stars was Hipparchus, who worked on the Greek island of Rhodes three centuries before, roughly between 190 and 120 bc.
Location, location, location
Babylonian astronomers had previously measured the positions of some stars around the zodiac, the constellations that lie along the ecliptic — the Sun’s annual path against the ‘fixed’ stars, as seen from Earth. But Hipparchus was the first to define the locations of stars using two coordinates, and to map stars across the whole sky. Among other things, it was Hipparchus himself who first discovered Earth’s precession, and he modelled the apparent motions of the Sun and Moon.
Gysembergh and his colleagues used the data they discovered to confirm that coordinates for three other star constellations (Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Draco), in a separate Medieval Latin manuscript known as the Aratus Latinus, must also come directly from Hipparchus. “The new fragment makes this much, much clearer,” says Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin. “This star catalogue that has been hovering in the literature as an almost hypothetical thing has become very concrete.”
Best map of Milky Way reveals a billion stars in motion
The researchers think that Hipparchus’s original list, like Ptolemy’s, would have included observations of nearly every visible star in the sky. Without a telescope, says Gysembergh, he must have used a sighting tube, known as a dioptra, or a mechanism called an armillary sphere. “It represents countless hours of work.”
The relationship between Hipparchus and Ptolemy has always been murky. Some scholars have suggested that Hipparchus’s catalogue never existed. Others (starting with sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe) argued that Ptolemy had stolen Hipparchus’s data and claimed it as his own. “Many people think that Hipparchus was the truly great discoverer,” says Gysembergh, whereas Ptolemy was “an amazing teacher” who compiled his predecessors’ work.
From the data in the fragments, the team concludes that Ptolemy did not simply copy Hipparchus’s numbers. But perhaps he should have: Hipparchus’s observations seem to be notably more accurate, with the coordinates read so far correct to within one degree. And whereas Ptolemy based his coordinate system on the ecliptic, Hipparchus used the celestial equator, a system more common in modern star maps.
Birth of a field
The discovery “enriches our picture” of Hipparchus, says Evans. “It gives us a fascinating glimpse of what he actually did.” And in doing so, it sheds light on a key development in Western civilization, the “mathematization of nature”, in which scholars seeking to understand the Universe shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw to aiming to measure, calculate and predict.
Hipparchus was the pivotal figure responsible for “turning astronomy into a predictive science”, agrees Ossendrijver. In his only surviving work, Hipparchus criticized earlier astronomical writers for not caring about numerical accuracy in their visions of orbits and celestial spheres.
He is thought to have been inspired by his contact with Babylonian astronomers, and to have had access to centuries’ worth of their precise observations. The Babylonians had no interest in modelling how the Solar System was arranged in three dimensions but, because of their belief in celestial omens, they made accurate observations and developed mathematical methods to model and predict the timing of events such as lunar eclipses. With Hipparchus, this tradition merged with the Greek geometric approach, says Evans, and “modern astronomy really begins”.
The researchers hope that as imaging techniques improve, they will uncover further star coordinates, giving them a larger data set to study. Several parts of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus have not yet been deciphered. It is also possible that additional pages from the star catalogue survive in the St Catherine’s library, which contains more than 160 palimpsests. Efforts to read these have already revealed previously unknown Greek medical texts, including drug recipes, surgical instructions and a guide to medicinal plants.
Beyond that, multispectral imaging of palimpsests is opening a rich new seam of ancient texts in archives around the world. “In Europe alone, there are literally thousands of palimpsests in major libraries,” says Gysembergh. “This is just one case, that’s very exciting, of a research possibility that can be applied to thousands of manuscripts with amazing discoveries every time.”
Harvey Weinstein’s holding cell is so revolting his lawyer argued the ex-movie mogul is facing “almost medieval” conditions where he’s detained after court during his Los Angeles sexual assault trial.
Attorney Mark Werksman in his pleas to a judge Tuesday even suggested his disgraced client did not have a place to go to the bathroom – an assertion quickly shot down by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench.
The complaints come on the second day of jury selection where Weinstein faces 11 counts of rape and sexual assault.
“It’s almost medieval, the conditions,” Werksman said. “He’s 70-years-old. I’m worried about him surviving this ordeal without a heart attack or stroke.”
The lawyer also said the cell was “unhygienic” and claimed he was left alone for three to four hours in his wheelchair in the “unsanitary, fetid” holding cell at the courthouse before he was brought back to jail.
Lench said she would discuss the conditions with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but warned there was little she could do.
Harvey Weinstein’s defense team has mentioned his health several times during court appearances.Getty Images
“I’m not minimizing it, I’m just not sure there’s a lot to be done,” she said.
The complaints by Werksman were lodged before Weinstein and 71 possible jurors entered the courtroom.
When Weinstein, 70, rolled in and climbed into his seat at the defense table, Werksman repeated his concerns and suggested Weinstein lacked a toilet in the cell, a notion the judge quickly dismissed.
“He’s not deprived of a toilet, there is a toilet in the cell,” Lench said. “I’m not going to let the record reflect that he’s deprived of a toilet.”
Werksman then walked back the insinuation, but argued, “It is unhygienic, it is virtually unusable, it is medieval.”
Weinstein’s defense team has pointed out his poor health on many occasions during both his New York trial and the pre-trial hearings on the west coast.
He was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York in February 2020 and was sentenced to 23 years in prison. But the state’s Court of Appeals agreed to hear Weinstein’s appeal on the guilty verdict.
The pale and frail man – a far cry from the towering figure he once was in the film industry – was hospitalized with chest pains and underwent a heart procedure after he was found guilty in 2020. He also contracted COVID-19 at one point in the first weeks of the pandemic in the US and suffers from diabetes, his lawyers have said.
Opening statements in the Los Angeles trial are expected to begin later this month – five years after bombshell reports of sexual misconduct ended his storied career at the height of the #MeToo movement.
The Oscar-winning ex-film producer faces four counts of rape and seven counts of sexual assault from five women in LA.
The identity of the remains of the six adults and 11 children and why they ended up in the medieval well had long vexed archaeologists. Unlike other mass burials where skeletons are uniformly arranged, the bodies were oddly positioned and mixed — likely caused by being thrown head first shortly after their deaths.
To understand more about how these people died, scientists were recently able to extract detailed genetic material preserved in the bones thanks to recent advances in ancient DNA sequencing. The genomes of six of the individuals showed that four of them were related — including three sisters, the youngest of whom was five to 10 years old. Further analysis of the genetic material suggested that all six were “almost certainly” Ashkenazi Jews.
The researchers believe they all died during antisemitic violence that wracked the city — most likely a February 1190 riot related to the Third Crusade, one of a series of religious wars supported by the church — as described by a medieval chronicler. The number of people killed in the massacre is unclear.
“I’m delighted and relieved that twelve years after we first started analysing the remains of these individuals, technology has caught up and helped us to understand this historical cold case of who these people were and why we think they were murdered,” said Selina Brace, a principal researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and lead author on the paper, said in a news release.
Judaism is primarily a shared religious and cultural identity, the study noted, but as a result of a long-standing practice of marrying within the community, Ashkenazi Jewish groups often carry a distinctive genetic ancestry that includes markers for some rare genetic disorders. These include Tay-Sachs disease, which is usually in fatal in childhood.
The researchers found that the individuals in the well shared a similar genetic ancestry to present-day Ashkenazi Jews, who, according to the study, are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories mainly in northern and Eastern Europe.
“Nobody had analyzed Jewish ancient DNA before because of prohibitions on the disturbance of Jewish graves. However, we did not know they were likely Jewish until after doing the genetic analyses,” evolutionary geneticist and study coauthor Mark Thomas, a professor at University College London, said in the release.
“It was quite surprising that the initially unidentified remains filled the historical gap about when certain Jewish communities first formed, and the origins of some genetic disorders,” he said.
The DNA analysis also allowed the researchers to infer the physical traits of a toddler boy found in the well. He likely had blue eyes and red hair, the latter a feature associated with historical stereotypes of European Jews, the study, published Tuesday by the journal Current Biology, said.
In the medieval manuscript “Imagines Historiarum II,” chronicler Ralph de Diceto paints a vivid picture of the massacre:
“Many of those who were hastening to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews before they invaded the Saracens. Accordingly on 6th February [in 1190 AD] all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle,” he wrote, according to the news release.
The well was located in what used to be the medieval Jewish quarter of Norwich, with the study noting that the city’s Jewish community were descendants of Ashkenazi Jews from Rouen, Normandy, who were invited to England by William the Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066.
The link with the 1190 riot isn’t definitive, however.
Radio carbon dating of the remains suggested the bodies ended up in the well at some point between 1161 to 1216 — a period which includes some well-documented outbreaks of antisemitic violence in England but also covers the Great Revolt of 1174 during which many people in the city were killed.
“Our study shows how effective archaeology, and particularly new scientific techniques such as ancient DNA, can be in providing new perspectives on historical events,” Tom Booth, a senior research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, said in the news release.
“Ralph de Diceto’s account of the 1190 AD attacks is evocative, but a deep well containing the bodies of Jewish men, women, and especially children forces us to confront the real horror of what happened.”
Archaeological treasures, including Stone Age pottery and medieval graves with swords and jewelry, have revealed a long history of human habitation near the Danube River in Germany.
At the site, in the Geisingen-Gutmadingen district of Tuttlingen, in southwestern Germany, archaeologists discovered one grave from the Neolithic, or Stone Age, that dates to the third millennium B.C. and contains distinctive pottery from the Corded Ware culture. They also found 140 early medieval graves, dating to between A.D. 500 and 600, that contain goods including swords, lances, shields, bone combs, drinking glasses and earrings.
“Our Gutmadingen district is probably much older than we previously assumed,” Mayor Martin Numberger said in a statement. The district had previously been dated to 1273 based on the first written records of settlement there.
Related: In a burial ground full of Stone Age men, one grave holds a ‘warrior’ woman
A corded ware pot, rock ax, and flint blade from a Stone Age grave found in southwestern Germany. (Image credit: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege im RPS / Yvonne Mühleis)
The finds were made by a team from archaeology firm ArchaeoTask GmbH in an area near the Danube river where a rainwater retention pond is planned. The Stone Age grave points to the presence of a The Corded Ware people, who are now known mostly for their pottery decorated by geometric lines formed by pressing cord into clay and leaving the impressions to dry. These people were probably pastoralists who kept animals such as cows and sheep, and some also practiced early farming of crops such as barley. Graves from this period are rare in southwestern Germany, according to local officials.
The early medieval graves date to the century after the end of the Western Roman Empire, which fell in 476 A.D. when the German warlord Odoacer deposed the Roman emperor Romulus Augustus. This period is part of what is known as the Migration Period, or the Völkerwanderung, when various tribes in Europe moved around, often conquering one another and pushing each other into new territories. Historians consider this period the transition between antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
In other graves from this period found in Germany, men are often buried with weapons, and women are interred with jewelry and beads. Burial rites sometimes changed as conquerors took over a particular village or region. For example, a Germanic tribe called the Alemanni was defeated by the Franks in A.D. 496 and became absorbed into the Duchy of the Merovingian.
During this transition, the Alemanni began burying the dead of their households together in graves called adelsgrablege (meaning “noble graves”), which also held rich goods, like armor and jewelry. A 2018 study of one of these graves dating to about A.D. 580 to 630 found that the members of the household weren’t necessarily related by blood and that adopted members of the family were valued equally to those born or married into it.
