Tag: History

Nov 19 2025

Book review: Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

This review is of Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a book of everything we know about Neanderthals. The aim of the author is to be fully up to date and reveal some of the conversations that academics working on Neanderthals are having now. The story is told across 16 thematic chapters.

Neanderthals first appeared approximately 400,000 years ago and became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Know Neanderthal sites were long concentrated in Western Europe, particularly France and Spain but more recently remains have been found much further East, well into Asia. They shared the world with early H. Sapiens and the Denisovans.

Neanderthals lived against a backdrop of repeated Ice Ages but they were but there were lengthy warmer periods, in fact the Eemian period, centred on 100,000 years ago was warmer than today.

The first Neanderthal remains were excavated in 1812-16 but not recognised as such. The original eponymous remains were found in the Neander valley south west of Dusseldorf in 1856, a Neanderthal skull was discovered in Gibraltar in 1848 but not recognised as such until 1864. These remains entered the scientific time when (white, male) Western European scientists were eagerly trying to demonstrate the superiority of the white race and so they were seen in this light. I wonder whether, if they were discovered now, they would be considered a separate species.

The remains we have amount to several hundred individuals, including 30 or so nearly complete skeletons, DNA sampling has been done on 30 or so individuals with high resolution genomes measured for 3. The remains cover individuals from stillborn infants, through children and adolescents to adults. Individuals over 50 are rare, this is true across all of the archaeological record; estimating the age of an older individual from bones is hard, and they are more fragile. Many of the skeletons shows signs of injury and disease.

The Neanderthal bones paint a picture of a species very similar to us, a little chunkier with well-developed upper arms. They appear to have been highly mobile which reflects modern hunter-gatherer societies.

A lot has happened in Neanderthal studies since I first learned of them in the eighties. Archaeological techniques have improved greatly, isotopic analysis to tease out diet and migrations and most recently DNA analysis have brought great insights. From an archaeological point of view the earliest excavations in the mid 19th century were fairly haphazard and even after that excavation tended to focus on big bones and stone tools (lithics, as they are referred to in this book). Experimental archaeology means we have a very detailed understanding of how lithics are made.

Nowadays everything is collected in an excavation, and recorded in enormous detail. This means that, for example, lithics and stone fragments can be refitted to their core (the stone from which they were all made) which enables us to identify different “technology” strands for the production of stone tools. Neanderthal lithics were not just the result of bashing rocks together. They clearly had a very firm grasp of the qualities of the materials they used, where best to source stone, how to best process them and how to repair them. This goes way beyond the tool use of modern apes. Early H. Sapiens lithic technology is arguably more advanced but it is not night and day. It is not just stone that Neanderthals understood, they also worked with bone, animal skins, resins from birch – again very selective of the materials they used. They butchered animals to get the most nutritious and high calorie cuts. The Schöningen spears are a set of wooden Neanderthals spears preserved in sediment on the edge of an ancient lake shore dating back at least 200,000 years.

Hearths form an important part of the archaeological record for Neanderthals, in caves under appropriate conditions we can see fires that represent perhaps just a few days stay – the smoke from them is trapped in flowstone the material from which stalagmites are made. They paint a picture of small groups returning to locations over periods of thousands of years. Cave sites are central to the archaeology of Neanderthals – it wasn’t clear to me whether this is simply what is preserved (camps out in the open would be less likely to survive) or whether Neanderthals spent significant time in caves. In any case they are places of repeated visits rather than long term stays. Wragg highlights another preservation bias, we see more nearly complete skeletons than we expect and more delicate children’s bones. This suggests special treatment of the dead, there is also evidence in the form of butchery marks on Neanderthal bones suggest ritual cannibalism and very limited evidence of decoration of corpses.

Perhaps even more surprisingly there is evidence for Neanderthal art, most strikingly the Bruniquel Cave stalagmite structures dating to 176,000 years ago. There are also traces of pigments on a number of artefacts and also patterns carved into bone.

Neanderthals as a distinct group disappeared approximately 40,000 years ago, it is not clear why they died out. Prior to their extinction the DNA evidence shows that they interbred with H. Sapiens several times over a periods of many thousands of years. We retain a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA from this time. Their demise may simply have been down to chance, the humans found in Western Europe today are not the descendants of the earliest H. Sapiens found in the area – we originate from further East. Perhaps the disappearance of the Neanderthals is something similar, a chance repopulation after climatic change .

I was interested to see Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children novels cited a couple of times as an inspiration for Wragg and other archaeologists working on Neanderthals. I remember reading the books avidly at some point in the 1980s, Auel was clearly in advance of their time showing Neanderthals in a rather more subtle light.

I came away from Kindred with a picture of Neanderthals very similar to my distant H. Sapiens ancestors, at a glance it seems a Neanderthal and their encampments would look very similar to those of H. Sapiens. At this point I wonder whether it is valid to consider them a separate species. Are they a boxer dog to H. Sapiens border collie?

Sep 15 2025

Book review: Six Thousand Years of Bread by H.E. Jacob

Six thousand years of bread by H.E. Jacob is an idiosyncratic book, I picked it up because I was interested in the history of bread. It covers a great deal of history and religion with bread (and hunger) a central theme. I had expected a more technical focus on flour, yeast and the bread making process over time.

The author, Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a German-Jew – arrested by the Nazis in 1938, imprisoned in Dachau and then Buchenwald before being released and emigrating to the United States. He worked as a journalist and author throughout his life. Six Thousand Years was published in English in 1944, the result of 20 years of research.

Six Thousand Years is divided into six “books” with each book comprised of a number of chapters – about 36 in total. To avoid confusion I’ll refer to them as sections, the sections are as follows:

  1. The Bread of Prehistoric Man
  2. Bread in the Ancient World
  3. Bread in the Middle Ages
  4. Bread in the Early Americas
  5. Bread in the Nineteenth Century
  6. Bread in our Time

The first section on The Bread of Prehistoric Man covers the domestication of grain and the invention of the plough. Jacob lists the species domesticated grass from millet (earliest), oats, barley and wheat (also early), rye (late classical) and maize, suggesting Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the source of wheat based on the diversity of species there. The modern view is that domestication happened further north in the Fertile Crescent centred on Mesopotamia. He locates the invention of the plough in Mesopotamia although he mentions China, he thinks the ancient ploughs found there were too sophisticated to have been invented there. I think this reflects the understanding of China in the West at the time of writing.

Bread in the Ancient World covers the invention of bread in the Ancient World, primarily in Egypt where leavened (sourdough) bread is believed to have been invented. There are tomb paintings from the period showing Egyptian bakeries. Bread was a de facto currency alongside beer, and was very central to Egyptian life. Herodotus referred to the Egyptians as “bread eaters” and made fun of their habit of kneading dough with their feet. Also included in this section are the symbolism of bread in Judaism, early Christianity. The parts on Greece are oriented around mythology and religion whilst Rome is more political. I was surprised the degree to which wheat was imported to Greece and Rome from Egypt and the area around the Black Sea.

After the fall of the Roman Empire a lot of agricultural knowledge was lost, this led in part to an outbreaks of ergotism most notably in 10th century France. Also lost was knowledge of water (grain) mills, and certainly an understanding as to why they were prone to exploding (flour dispersed in air is very explosive). A lot of the background to this section is the animosity between the peasant growing and harvesting grain, and the miller – often milling on behalf of a lord who banned milling in the home, the baker and the townsfolk. There is also a section here on transubstantiation and the Reformation, as well as hunger – which was a recurring feature of life in the Middle Ages. Hunger seems to have arisen largely because of the way society was structured with the peasants growing grain very restricted in what they could do with the grain they had grown, and obliged to pay significant tithes.

Moving to the Americas we learn about the introduction of maize and potatoes to the West from the Americas. Again Jacob seems to be a bit mystified that non-Western peoples could breed maize and potatoes without Western intervention. Maize is in many ways superior to wheat, it grows more quickly in the climate of much of the Americas and requires little in terms of preparation to plant. The introduction of maize and potatoes to the West was quite rapid but there were suspicions about both. Rye was more successful in the Americas than wheat. Interestingly there was a rye / wheat divide in Europe with Germany, Poland and Russia eating rye bread almost exclusively and France and England eating wheat bread – this division weakened in the period after the French Revolution as white bread became aspirational.

The main focus of the 19th century is on the mechanisation of agriculture, starting off in the United States with mechanized reaping machines in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that roller mills were introduced which allowed white flour to be made more easily, and improved throughput. Bread baking in the US started to be mechanised. Elsewhere Justus von Liebig was working on artificial fertilizers which improved yields – this was on the basis of improved understanding of plant biology. In the American Civil War bread played a role – the North grew wheat, made bread and transported it on the new railway lines – the South grew cotton which you can’t eat nor could it be sold abroad and grain import imported. Furthermore, the North grew and harvested wheat with a reduced workforce, many having gone to fight, which they carried on doing after the war allowing America to dominate the supply of wheat to the global market.

The final section covers the first half of the 20th century including the First World War and the American Dust Bowl – a result of over-exploitation of the land to grow wheat. Interestingly the Americans identified the problem quite promptly, and started to address it with a programme of converting wheat fields to pasture and planting trees. It finishes talking about Hitler’s very direct policies of starvation, allocating starvation levels of food to non-Germans and Jewish people. He also talks about the horticultural revolution which led to the cold hardy wheat grown in Canada and the Soviet Union, and other northern. It is here that we see most clearly that 6000 years was written 80 years ago – Jacob considers Lysenko, the Soviet biologist, something of a hero and the battle over the health benefits of white bread when compared to more wholemeal bread was still on. These days Lysenko is known as an anti-Darwinist, and for his suppression of opponents through his political power. Obviously the book was written before the further Green Revolution of the 1970s which also impacted the growing of wheat.

6000 years is rather long and rambling but I found it pretty readable and the wider focus made me curious about, for example, the mechanisation of agriculture in 19th century. It is anachronistic in places, and I think in some areas our understanding has moved on.

Aug 04 2025

Book review: A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge

My next review is of A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge. This is a collection of 47 chapters on different aspects of geographic borders. The book is divided into three parts, the first “histories” talks about borders through history, the second on “legacies” is about borders we see today – often the unusual – and how they came to be. The final, shorter, part is on “externalities” – on borders in the air, sea and time. The chapters are standalone so its easy to dip in and out – if that is how you prefer to read – it makes reviewing more difficult since 47 separate stories can’t be summarised in a short blog post.

The histories section starts with the border between Lower and Upper Egypt which dates back to 4th millennium BC. We know this was a border because ancient Egyptian records reference kings of the Upper and Lower Kingdom. Ancient Egypt was divided into administrative regions called “nomes” – like counties – which persisted for the enormous period of 3200 years until the Muslim invasions of 640CE.

It was a revelation to me how recent the idea of a modern nation state is – really just the last 300 or so years, and how the world was not neatly tessellated with states until quite recently. To be fair there are sufficient border disputes to argue that the world is not neatly filled now. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often seen as the birth of the modern nation state – although the written agreement is rather thin on details. The rise of the modern state was a combination of political developments but also improved mapping from the 16th century – accurate mapping being a pre-requisite for establishing borders.

I was excited to learn of the Marcher Lords and the origins of the Marquis title; the Marches are border areas whose lords were given greater flexibility in, for example, raising an army, in order to defend borders. Marquis is the French term for such a lord. The ability to raise an army is a risk to the state – as the Roman Empire discovered on several occasions.

The legacies section talks about interesting borders in the present day. I think my favourite is on the borders in Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau – a Belgian town surrounded by a Dutch one, as a result of the Holy Roman Empire and various feudal lords. It isn’t even as simple as a single boundary – there are something like 30 parcels of land in the town, some as small as 50 metres on a side. There are also a couple of German and Italian towns embedded in Switzerland.

This section also contains stories of accidental invasion, the most benign of these are the Swiss “invasions” of Liechtenstein. These are generally because the border is heavily forested in places and there is no indication on the ground as to the location of the border – these have happened repeatedly in the last 50 years. Other borders suffer more fractious disputes – the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute is in the news as I write.

Bir Tawil on the Egypt – Jordan border is an area the size of Surrey claimed by neither state because to claim it would mean giving up claim on a more lucrative piece of nearby land. This is one of many places where post-colonial borders – often drawn along lines of latitude or longitude – have led to problems in the present day. This is partly because they paid no attention to features on the ground but also because, at the time they were set, the precision with which longitude could be measured was not that high.

Surprisingly this also effects the USA, where in addition to lines of latitude and longitude treaties often contained later-to-be-discovered-vague geographical references. I read a whole separate book on the borders of the US states. The origins of the District of Columbia, where the US capital sits are also discussed – originally this was a square plot of land demarcated for the capital so that no state had an advantage in the federal government, later it lost the land on one side of the Potomac River. In the modern era this has led to an anomaly where the many residents of the capital are democratically under-represented – they only gained a democratically elected mayor in 1975.

The externalities section covers the prime meridian – where the zero for longitude is set, time zones, the international date line, Antarctica, Eurovision, various landlocked countries, maritime boundaries and boundaries in the air and space, or rather the boundary between air and space. It is eclectic, to say the least. I found the chapter on maritime boundaries particularly interesting – I was surprised how recently the law on territorial waters came into force (1994).

This made good holiday reading, it is written in an engaging style and chapters are of a handy length to read sitting in the garden in an hour or so. The sources and further reading section is excellent if you want to learn more about any chapter.

Postscript: I made a note to myself that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia map of Australia was not reproduced in the book, so I link it here. To be fair it would not reproduce well in black and white at the scale of the book.

Jul 11 2025

Book review: The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth

As I enter retirement I have started going to an actual bookshop for my non-fiction reading, The Book-Makers – A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth is the fruit of this approach.

My Goodreads account shows I have read 618 books since I started using the site about 10 years ago – it is fair to say I am a big fan of books.

Smyth’s book is about people who make or made books, divided across 11 thematic chapters. The chapters are ordered chronologically. Books are defined quite broadly, when he talks about Benjamin Franklin (under non-books) he includes newspapers, advertising and bank notes.

The chapters can be grouped into wider themes. The first of these are the technical aspects of printing: printing, binding. typography and paper. The Book Makers starts with Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) who was an apprentice of William Caxton, who introduced the first printing press to England in 1476. de Worde’s contribution was the large number of titles he printed, and what he printed – literature for the masses. The thing that struck me about the printing and binding is that these were distinct process in the early years of print, a customer would buy the printed pages of a book and take them elsewhere for binding. This explains how the books in country houses often have such uniform appearance.

The metal type used to print is a recurring theme, it has its own chapter with John Baskerville (1707-75) and his wife, Sarah Eaves (1708-88) who took over his business after he died. Baskerville was late to printing – his first book was printed when he was 51. His goal was to produce the most beautiful books possible, drawing on his experience in calligraphy and “japanning”. You may be familiar with the Baskerville font which he created in 1752. Later we find Thomas Cobden-Sanderson throwing his type into the Thames so that his business partner wouldn’t get hold of it! Metal type is the heart of printing, and sets of metal type are shared and inherited between printers – this can be traced by the characteristic wear on individual letters which is revealed in the print they produce.

Also in this theme of the technical aspects of printing is the manufacture of paper, something Smyth describes as a neglected area for historical study. Paper production went from 55 tonnes per year in 1805 to 25,000 tonnes in 1835 as a result of the continuous paper production process that Nicolas-Louis Robert patented in 1799. He died a pauper since patent protection was not well-established and he didn’t have the means to defend what was clearly a lucrative idea. This huge increase in production of paper means that it finds more applications – in toilet paper, advertising and flyers. It becomes a throw-away commodity.

There are a group of chapters that talk about publishing beyond the book: cut and paste, non-books, extra-illustration and a variety of recent print innovations (zines, artist books and so forth). The “cut and paste” chapter visits Mary and Anna Collet two women at Little Giddings – a religious community near Cambridge – in the earlier part of the 17th century. Their great work was the “Harmony”, a biblical text which attempted to harmonise the five books of the Pentateuch. It was made by very literally cutting and pasting text (often at the word level) from copies of the bible, augmenting the text with illustrations similarly harvested. This was a work of sufficient quality that Charles II praised it.

Extra-illustration, also called Grangerism, is a similar practice found around the start of the 19th century. In extra-illustration enthusiastic amateurs produced enhanced versions of books by adding illustrations they had sourced elsewhere. The name is after James Granger’s Biographical History of England which helpfully lists all know images of each of the biographical characters it introduces – a book made for Grangerism. I am partial to a bit of a sort of extra-illustration of my own, coincidentally I labelled my post on this Obsession – Grangerism seems to have been an obsession in at least some cases.

There’s one chapter on lending libraries – in particular Charles Edward Mudie’s (1818-90) lending library which was massive in the later part of the 19th century – distributing books across the UK and the rest of the world. Authors not included in Mudie’s library were at a disadvantage in the commercial market. Commercial lending libraries largely disappeared with the arrival of public libraries from the 1920s. I was interested to learn that WH Smith had a lending library, rail users with the appropriate subscription could pick up a book at one station and leave it at another.

Finally, there are couple of chapters on small presses. William Morris had a small press (Kelmscott Press) – but the focus here is on Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and his Dove Press. Morris and Cobden-Sanderson focussed on the retro, printing high quality volumes in small print runs, harking back to the techniques and styles of early printing (and even manuscripts). Smyth notes that the quality of paper, ink and print does not increase massively over the long term but the efficiency with which it can be done increases greatly.

A chapter is devoted to Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press which was active a little later and focused on printing modernist works in small print runs. She attracted some high profile authors before they were famous, and engaged in political activism through her press. Virginia Woolf ran a similar press – Hogarth which still exists as an imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Woolf and Cunard appreciated their presses as a way of publishing their own work. It seems both of them enjoyed the sometimes messy and manual process of book making.

I must admit I found the final chapter on “Zones, Do-it-yourself, boxes, artist books” a bit anti-climatic perhaps because I don’t consider things happening in my lifetime as “history”!

This is an excellent book for people who love books, I found the parts about the early years of printing when the form of the book had not solidified most interesting.

Jun 16 2025

Book review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom

My next review is of The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom, a book I found via a review in New Scientist. It is about the contents of cuneiform tablets, mainly from the library at Nineveh close to Mosul in modern day Iraq. The library at Nineveh was compiled under the direction of King Ashurbanipal who ruled Assyria from 669BC to 631BC. The library was sacked in 612BC by the Babylonians. Cuneiform is a script written by impressing a stylus on wet clay tablets to produce wedge shapes. The clay tablets make an excellent preservation medium particularly when the library containing them is burnt, thus firing them. The library at Nineveh contained 30,000 tablets from a period of over 1000 years – the Assyrians were well aware of this deep history. In total we have about 500,000 tablets written in cuneiform in the Sumerian and Assyrian dialects of the Akkadian language. The contents of the tablets are very varied; there are works of literature, personal letters, instruction manuals for exorcists, medics, lamenters and even a meeting agenda.

The Library starts with a chapter on the cuneiform writing system, it originated in Uruk in around 2700BC descended from earlier, simple tally marks used in the area as early as 8000BC. Cuneiform is a subtle writing system and scribes took pride in both their “penmanship” and also the way the language was used in this respect it reminds me of the written Chinese language. However, it seems writing had a different status than it has now, many of the tablets in the library and elsewhere appear to have been written out as teaching aids indeed elsewhere the practice tablets of students are found as part of the structure of buildings. Poems such the Epic of Gilgamesh are found in multiple versions and stages of “completeness” as it evolved over time. One gets the impression that Mesopotamia maintained a strong oral tradition but specialists had access to written records.

Subsequent chapters cover different themes (The Power of the Gods, Magic and Witchcraft, The Treatment of Disease, Reading the Signs, Messages in the Stars, Literature, The Waging of War, Lamentation), with each starting with a dramatic vignette followed by a discussion in detail about the elements of the vignette and how they fit into wider Mesopotamian culture. I see from their biography that Wisnom is a poet and playwright as well as an academic Assyriologist, I can see how these vignettes and the wider analysis of cuneiform text is informed by this.

To modern eyes the Mesopotamians are bound up in exorcists, gods, omens, signs in the sky – seemingly highly superstitious. However, these are a pre-cursor to modern science – this is very obvious in the case of astronomy where the Babylonians who kept detailed and accurate astronomical records which allowed them to predict phenomena such as eclipses. More widely the search for omens led to a great deal of observation, and the predictions arising from those observations had a logical, internal consistency. They were building a model of the world but based on what we now know to be largely the wrong underlying data.

I particularly enjoyed the section on extispicy – the art of divination via the entrails of a sacrificed animal, typically a sheep and usually the liver of the sheep. The Mesopotamians were very keen on their extispicy, as a measure of this they had names for five distinct parts of a sheep heart but one vague term for the human heart. They had quite a scientific approach to their extispicy, there were written guides and sometimes multiple people interpreted the same liver to check for consistency. The output of an extispicy was a yes/no answer.

Lamentations form a big chunk of the library, these are ritual chants bemoaning a poor state of affairs to the gods. They have two purposes, one is to appeal to the gods for support after a calamity has happened, the other is to describe a possible calamity to the gods as an appeal not to carry out the calamity. There three types of lamentation: balags, ershemmas and ershahungas the first two of these are named for the instruments that accompanied them whilst the third sounds like a more choral.

The book finishes with a chapter on A Day in the life of Ashurbanipal which acts as a handy summary of the preceding chapters and a chapter on the life of cuneiform and Babylonian culture after the fall of the Assyrian empire – the last written cuneiform dates to around 80AD. Reading the book I was puzzled as to why I had not heard more about Mesopotamia but having finished I realise I had, the Old Testament has strong parallels to Mesopotamian myths as do ancient Greek myths. The signs of the zodiac and the way we measure time in hours, minutes and second come from ancient Mesopotamia.

This is quite a big book but it did not feel like a chore to read it. I was struck by the detail in which we know about Mesopotamian lives – certainly those around the King. There is an extensive annotated biography – perhaps learning cuneiform will make a suitable retirement project!