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Really? The Claim: Restrooms Are the Dirtiest Public Areas
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
THE FACTS
They are widely considered the most bacteria-laden places around. But how much truth does the conventional wisdom about public restrooms really hold? Over the years, various studies have found that they are not quite so bad, at least compared with other public areas.
One of the most extensive and revealing studies of the claim was published recently in The International Journal of Environmental Health Research. A team of scientists spent four years collecting nearly 1,100 samples at places like airports, restaurants, offices and bathrooms in four American cities. The scientists looked specifically for levels of bacteria as well as biological markers that indicated the presence of things like sweat, hemoglobin and urea.
The most frequently contaminated areas were playgrounds and day care centers, with 46 percent showing high levels of contamination. Public restroom surfaces ranked far behind, at 25 percent, just ahead of public transportation handrails and armrests (in buses, for example) and shopping cart handles (about 21 percent each). Not far behind that were escalator handrails (19 percent), vending machine buttons (14 percent) and public phones (13 percent).
The study also found that in about 86 percent of cases, the contaminants on a surface were transferred to an individual’s hands, and then, in 82 percent of cases, to personal belongings.
But other studies have produced reassuring findings. Most have found that the risk of illness from these sources is low, and that washing your hands with soap and water can reduce that risk by about 50 percent.
THE BOTTOM LINE Public restrooms rank behind playgrounds and just ahead of handrails in terms of contamination levels.
South Africa Considers Culling Elephants as Last Resort
By MICHAEL WINES, The New York Times, March 1, 2007
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 28 — South Africa’s environment minister offered a new plan on Wednesday to control the nation’s booming elephant population that contemplates resuming the much-criticized killing of excess animals, but only after thorough scientific study and as a last resort.
Without some form of population control, elephants will soon overwhelm the public parks and private game reserves where they can still roam free, the minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, warned.
Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal, unveiled at a crowded elephant reserve in the nation’s southeast, appeared to defuse for now a looming confrontation between environmentalists and game managers over ways to manage the nation’s 20,000 elephants, a major tourist attraction and, in some parks, a growing headache.
National park officials have already considered a mass killing, or culling, of elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa’s biggest and best-known wildlife reserve. They contended that the park, with a population of at least 12,500 elephants, could support only 7,500. Some conservationists have agreed, saying that preserving the park’s biological diversity is more important than saving elephants.
But some environmentalists and elephant researchers argue that the killings are both unnecessary and inhumane, given elephants’ high intelligence and complex social structure.
South Africa ordered the killing of more than 14,000 elephants in Kruger until an international outcry helped bring about a moratorium in 1995. Opponents of culling have threatened to start a boycott of South Africa tourism, a huge moneymaker here, were a new culling campaign to be approved.
While he did not rule out further killings, Mr. van Schalkwyk, who is also minister of tourism, made it clear on Wednesday that the cullings would be both limited and approved only after other options had been exhausted.
“The government will never give a blank check to culling,” he said.
Instead, the new proposal envisions a range of methods to address the rising number of elephants, including contraception and luring elephants from crowded parks to vacant spaces.
There are no quick options. Contraception is not a simple solution, in part because it subjects female elephants to great stress from more frequent matings with heavy bulls. Nor is it easy to relocate elephant herds, although the recent removal of fences between Kruger park and vacant parkland in neighboring Mozambique holds the prospect that elephants will eventually migrate there.
Mr. van Schalkwyk also allotted about $700,000 for scientists to study elephant management techniques and to address some basic questions, including whether the existing population is straining the habitat as much as some say.
That elephants are destructive is unquestioned. African elephants can eat as much as 5 percent of their weight and drink up to 50 gallons of water a day, and herds have been known to reduce forests and bushlands to treeless expanses of weeds, grass and broken stumps.
The government says that South African herds are growing at a rate of 6 percent a year. Left unchecked, officials say, the national elephant population will rise from 20,000 now to more than 34,000 in 2020, 12 years from now.
Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal must still be subjected to public comment, and it could be months before it or another plan is approved. But some critics of South Africa’s elephant management plans gave this one their cautious approval on Wednesday.
“The government has committed to the role of science in the context of elephant management in South Africa, and that is critical,” said Jason Bell-Leask, the southern Africa director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The fund has run an aggressive campaign against further elephant killings in South Africa.
Hennie Lotter, an ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Johannesburg, has called elephant culling “a just war nobody wants.” Elephants rank close to the top of the hierarchy of animals that merit human respect, he said; elephants appear to have an elementary language, mourn their dead and raise their young in ways that humans can recognize.
Mr. Lotter said that the government’s new plan appeared “to be the responsible thing” but that its success depended on how it would be carried out.
A United Kingdom? Maybe
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.
But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist’s point of view, seems likely to please no one. The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins.
That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.
The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people moved back north. The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the Atlantic coastline, since the English Channel and the Irish Sea were still land.
This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near East. Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German, but these invaders’ numbers were also small compared with the local population.
In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story” (Carroll & Graf, 2006).
Ireland received the fewest of the subsequent invaders; their DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer estimates. DNA from invaders accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about a third in eastern and southern England.
But no single group of invaders is responsible for more than 5 percent of the current gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer says on the basis of genetic data. He cites figures from the archaeologist Heinrich Haerke that the Anglo-Saxon invasions that began in the fourth century A.D. added about 250,000 people to a British population of one to two million, an estimate that Dr. Oppenheimer notes is larger than his but considerably less than the substantial replacement of the English population assumed by others. The Norman invasion of 1066 brought not many more than 10,000 people, according to Dr. Haerke.
Other geneticists say Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction is plausible, though some disagree with details. Several said genetic methods did not give precise enough dates to be confident of certain aspects, like when the first settlers arrived.
“Once you have an established population, it is quite difficult to change it very radically,” said Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College, Dublin. But he said he was “quite agnostic” as to whether the original population became established in Britain and Ireland immediately after the glaciers retreated 16,000 years ago, as Dr. Oppenheimer argues, or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which began 10,000 years ago.
Bryan Sykes, another Oxford geneticist, said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer that the ancestors of “by far the majority of people” were present in the British Isles before the Roman conquest of A.D. 43. “The Saxons, Vikings and Normans had a minor effect, and much less than some of the medieval historical texts would indicate,” he said. His conclusions, based on his own genetic survey and information in his genealogical testing service, Oxford Ancestors, are reported in his new book, “Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.”
A different view of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has been developed by Mark Thomas of University College, London. Dr. Thomas and colleagues say the invaders wiped out substantial numbers of the indigenous population, replacing 50 percent to 100 percent of those in central England. Their argument is that the Y chromosomes of English men seem identical to those of people in Norway and the Friesland area of the Netherlands, two regions from which the invaders may have originated.
Dr. Oppenheimer disputes this, saying the similarity between the English and northern European Y chromosomes arises because both regions were repopulated by people from the Iberian refuges after the glaciers retreated.
Dr. Sykes said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer on this point, but another geneticist, Christopher Tyler-Smith of the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, said the jury was still out. “There is not yet a consensus view among geneticists, so the genetic story may well change,” he said. As to the identity of the first postglacial settlers, Dr. Tyler-Smith said he “would favor a Neolithic origin for the Y chromosomes, although the evidence is still quite sketchy.”
Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists. These are not generally accepted by historical linguists, who long ago developed but largely rejected a dating method known as glottochronology. Geneticists have recently plunged into the field, arguing that linguists have been too pessimistic and that advanced statistical methods developed for dating genes can also be applied to languages.
Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel.
The Belgae perhaps introduced some socially transforming technique, such as iron-working, which led to their language replacing that of the indigenous inhabitants, but Dr. Forster said he had not yet identified any specific innovation from the archaeological record.
Germanic is usually assumed to have split into three branches: West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch; East Germanic, the language of the Goths and Vandals; and North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages. Dr. Forster’s analysis shows English is not an offshoot of West Germanic, as usually assumed, but is a branch independent of the other three, which also implies a greater antiquity. Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, Dr. Forster estimates.
Historians have usually assumed that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain when the Romans arrived. But Dr. Oppenheimer argues that the absence of Celtic place names in England — words for places are particularly durable — makes this unlikely.
If the people of the British Isles hold most of their genetic heritage in common, with their differences consisting only of a regional flavoring of Celtic in the west and of northern European in the east, might that perception draw them together? Geneticists see little prospect that their findings will reduce cultural and political differences. The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.
Dr. Oppenheimer said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.
As for his thesis that the British and Irish are genetically much alike, “It would be wonderful if it improved relations, but I somehow think it won’t.”
Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
THE FACTS
They are widely considered the most bacteria-laden places around. But how much truth does the conventional wisdom about public restrooms really hold? Over the years, various studies have found that they are not quite so bad, at least compared with other public areas.
One of the most extensive and revealing studies of the claim was published recently in The International Journal of Environmental Health Research. A team of scientists spent four years collecting nearly 1,100 samples at places like airports, restaurants, offices and bathrooms in four American cities. The scientists looked specifically for levels of bacteria as well as biological markers that indicated the presence of things like sweat, hemoglobin and urea.
The most frequently contaminated areas were playgrounds and day care centers, with 46 percent showing high levels of contamination. Public restroom surfaces ranked far behind, at 25 percent, just ahead of public transportation handrails and armrests (in buses, for example) and shopping cart handles (about 21 percent each). Not far behind that were escalator handrails (19 percent), vending machine buttons (14 percent) and public phones (13 percent).
The study also found that in about 86 percent of cases, the contaminants on a surface were transferred to an individual’s hands, and then, in 82 percent of cases, to personal belongings.
But other studies have produced reassuring findings. Most have found that the risk of illness from these sources is low, and that washing your hands with soap and water can reduce that risk by about 50 percent.
THE BOTTOM LINE Public restrooms rank behind playgrounds and just ahead of handrails in terms of contamination levels.
South Africa Considers Culling Elephants as Last Resort
By MICHAEL WINES, The New York Times, March 1, 2007
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 28 — South Africa’s environment minister offered a new plan on Wednesday to control the nation’s booming elephant population that contemplates resuming the much-criticized killing of excess animals, but only after thorough scientific study and as a last resort.
Without some form of population control, elephants will soon overwhelm the public parks and private game reserves where they can still roam free, the minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, warned.
Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal, unveiled at a crowded elephant reserve in the nation’s southeast, appeared to defuse for now a looming confrontation between environmentalists and game managers over ways to manage the nation’s 20,000 elephants, a major tourist attraction and, in some parks, a growing headache.
National park officials have already considered a mass killing, or culling, of elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa’s biggest and best-known wildlife reserve. They contended that the park, with a population of at least 12,500 elephants, could support only 7,500. Some conservationists have agreed, saying that preserving the park’s biological diversity is more important than saving elephants.
But some environmentalists and elephant researchers argue that the killings are both unnecessary and inhumane, given elephants’ high intelligence and complex social structure.
South Africa ordered the killing of more than 14,000 elephants in Kruger until an international outcry helped bring about a moratorium in 1995. Opponents of culling have threatened to start a boycott of South Africa tourism, a huge moneymaker here, were a new culling campaign to be approved.
While he did not rule out further killings, Mr. van Schalkwyk, who is also minister of tourism, made it clear on Wednesday that the cullings would be both limited and approved only after other options had been exhausted.
“The government will never give a blank check to culling,” he said.
Instead, the new proposal envisions a range of methods to address the rising number of elephants, including contraception and luring elephants from crowded parks to vacant spaces.
There are no quick options. Contraception is not a simple solution, in part because it subjects female elephants to great stress from more frequent matings with heavy bulls. Nor is it easy to relocate elephant herds, although the recent removal of fences between Kruger park and vacant parkland in neighboring Mozambique holds the prospect that elephants will eventually migrate there.
Mr. van Schalkwyk also allotted about $700,000 for scientists to study elephant management techniques and to address some basic questions, including whether the existing population is straining the habitat as much as some say.
That elephants are destructive is unquestioned. African elephants can eat as much as 5 percent of their weight and drink up to 50 gallons of water a day, and herds have been known to reduce forests and bushlands to treeless expanses of weeds, grass and broken stumps.
The government says that South African herds are growing at a rate of 6 percent a year. Left unchecked, officials say, the national elephant population will rise from 20,000 now to more than 34,000 in 2020, 12 years from now.
Mr. van Schalkwyk’s proposal must still be subjected to public comment, and it could be months before it or another plan is approved. But some critics of South Africa’s elephant management plans gave this one their cautious approval on Wednesday.
“The government has committed to the role of science in the context of elephant management in South Africa, and that is critical,” said Jason Bell-Leask, the southern Africa director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The fund has run an aggressive campaign against further elephant killings in South Africa.
Hennie Lotter, an ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Johannesburg, has called elephant culling “a just war nobody wants.” Elephants rank close to the top of the hierarchy of animals that merit human respect, he said; elephants appear to have an elementary language, mourn their dead and raise their young in ways that humans can recognize.
Mr. Lotter said that the government’s new plan appeared “to be the responsible thing” but that its success depended on how it would be carried out.
A United Kingdom? Maybe
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.
But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist’s point of view, seems likely to please no one. The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins.
That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.
The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people moved back north. The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the Atlantic coastline, since the English Channel and the Irish Sea were still land.
This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near East. Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German, but these invaders’ numbers were also small compared with the local population.
In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story” (Carroll & Graf, 2006).
Ireland received the fewest of the subsequent invaders; their DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer estimates. DNA from invaders accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about a third in eastern and southern England.
But no single group of invaders is responsible for more than 5 percent of the current gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer says on the basis of genetic data. He cites figures from the archaeologist Heinrich Haerke that the Anglo-Saxon invasions that began in the fourth century A.D. added about 250,000 people to a British population of one to two million, an estimate that Dr. Oppenheimer notes is larger than his but considerably less than the substantial replacement of the English population assumed by others. The Norman invasion of 1066 brought not many more than 10,000 people, according to Dr. Haerke.
Other geneticists say Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction is plausible, though some disagree with details. Several said genetic methods did not give precise enough dates to be confident of certain aspects, like when the first settlers arrived.
“Once you have an established population, it is quite difficult to change it very radically,” said Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College, Dublin. But he said he was “quite agnostic” as to whether the original population became established in Britain and Ireland immediately after the glaciers retreated 16,000 years ago, as Dr. Oppenheimer argues, or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which began 10,000 years ago.
Bryan Sykes, another Oxford geneticist, said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer that the ancestors of “by far the majority of people” were present in the British Isles before the Roman conquest of A.D. 43. “The Saxons, Vikings and Normans had a minor effect, and much less than some of the medieval historical texts would indicate,” he said. His conclusions, based on his own genetic survey and information in his genealogical testing service, Oxford Ancestors, are reported in his new book, “Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.”
A different view of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has been developed by Mark Thomas of University College, London. Dr. Thomas and colleagues say the invaders wiped out substantial numbers of the indigenous population, replacing 50 percent to 100 percent of those in central England. Their argument is that the Y chromosomes of English men seem identical to those of people in Norway and the Friesland area of the Netherlands, two regions from which the invaders may have originated.
Dr. Oppenheimer disputes this, saying the similarity between the English and northern European Y chromosomes arises because both regions were repopulated by people from the Iberian refuges after the glaciers retreated.
Dr. Sykes said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer on this point, but another geneticist, Christopher Tyler-Smith of the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, said the jury was still out. “There is not yet a consensus view among geneticists, so the genetic story may well change,” he said. As to the identity of the first postglacial settlers, Dr. Tyler-Smith said he “would favor a Neolithic origin for the Y chromosomes, although the evidence is still quite sketchy.”
Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists. These are not generally accepted by historical linguists, who long ago developed but largely rejected a dating method known as glottochronology. Geneticists have recently plunged into the field, arguing that linguists have been too pessimistic and that advanced statistical methods developed for dating genes can also be applied to languages.
Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel.
The Belgae perhaps introduced some socially transforming technique, such as iron-working, which led to their language replacing that of the indigenous inhabitants, but Dr. Forster said he had not yet identified any specific innovation from the archaeological record.
Germanic is usually assumed to have split into three branches: West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch; East Germanic, the language of the Goths and Vandals; and North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages. Dr. Forster’s analysis shows English is not an offshoot of West Germanic, as usually assumed, but is a branch independent of the other three, which also implies a greater antiquity. Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, Dr. Forster estimates.
Historians have usually assumed that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain when the Romans arrived. But Dr. Oppenheimer argues that the absence of Celtic place names in England — words for places are particularly durable — makes this unlikely.
If the people of the British Isles hold most of their genetic heritage in common, with their differences consisting only of a regional flavoring of Celtic in the west and of northern European in the east, might that perception draw them together? Geneticists see little prospect that their findings will reduce cultural and political differences. The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.
Dr. Oppenheimer said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.
As for his thesis that the British and Irish are genetically much alike, “It would be wonderful if it improved relations, but I somehow think it won’t.”
Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
