Fingerprints Are Timeless and, More Importantly, Completely Unique.

We've all seen the crime dramas: since the late 19th century fingerprints have been the key method of unique identification for individuals and have been used to lock down security and solve crimes. Unless you're a member of the Men in Black, you're not likely to loose them any time soon.

But is it possible that fingerprints can do more than solve crimes? What if we could use them to identify and track people who died hundreds if not thousands of years ago? 

Dr Philippa Hoskin of the University of Lincoln, supported by AHRC funding, is looking to do just that. Working with the University of Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute, the project will aim to examine around 3,000 documents from the middle ages to see what fingerprints and palm prints have been preserved on the wax seals of these documents. Through searching in the National Library of Wales, the Westminster Abbey Muniments and the cathedral libraries of Exeter, Lincoln and Hereford, they hope to gather together very high resolution images and detailed descriptions of these fingerprints.

"So what?" You might ask. After all, these people aren't alive and with us today and, given that fingerprinting wasn't taking place back in medieval times, how do we identify anyone? 

The key here is the ability to track one man or woman's work across multiple documents: what did one particular person work on? How long did he work and what was his productivity? What documents was he involved in? Did he move around? Fingerprints allow us to focus in on one person's life as an individual - a notoriously difficult feat in a time before widespread literacy.

From the Journal of Ancient Fingerprints

The study of ancient fingerprints isn't a new discipline, but it is an under-represented one. Between the 1920s and the 1960s several keen archaeologists such as W.F.Bade, Charles Walston, Harold Cummins and Kurt Obenhaur identified ancient fingerprint marks left on ceramic pottery, figurines and lamps. These, along with other examples, inspired the foundation of the Fingerprint centre in Stockholme by Paul Astrom and Sven.A.Eriksson. As time went on, further fingerpints of the ancient world were identified, often embedded in pottery when the soft clay had been worked. Through looking at these fingerprints in detail the careers of many individuals were tracked, injuries and evidence of hard manual labour were identified, age could be estimated, and finally individuals roles and employment status can be identified. These silent individuals from far flung history were finally given their own subtle voice. As fingerprints are timeless, the same technique can be stretched all the way back into the stone age.

The Journal of Ancient Fingerprints is dedicated to spreading further knowledge about this quirky section of archaeology, so if you're intrigued about the details and potential of ancient fingerprinting you should definitely check it out.

Sources

- AHRC funded project "Medieval Seals and Fingerprints" - University of Sheffield

- The Journal of Ancient fingerprints

- Ezfingerprints frequently asked questions

Generally, people like to view history a one long linear road to progress.

A fish climbs out of water to walk on land; a monkey drops down from a tree and stands up in the long grass, stone tools turn to bronze and iron tools, hunter-gathering turns to farming, cities grow and soon enough we rocket off into space, all the while getting cleverer and living more fulfilling lives.
Of course this is all a lie: history just isn't that simple. Instead of a linear path, history can be a lot more...well...

For example, breakthrough inventions can be discovered simultaneously, or created 'early' and then forgotten, or even developed only to be deliberately rejected. History can be doomed to repeat itself, or can be wiped away in one sudden catastrophe. 'Progress' is relative and is inescapably tied to the values of the people who live at the time: values that often seem to make little logical sense. 

So, with that in mind, I wanted to take a look at what is viewed as the biggest leap forward in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. Was it the big and 'inevitable' leap forward that we have always been told it is? In his book 'Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind' Yuval Noah Harari argues that it was instead the worse mistake we could have made.

Hunting and Gathering

Part of the Gobekli Tepe Temple

In prehistory human societies (Sapien or otherwise) sustained themselves by hunting and gathering for around 2.5million years. The land they roamed could, on average, support around 100 individuals with relative ease. The ability to roam gave us a very varied diet, and one that could be flexible enough to support us when one stream of possible food ran dry. Humans could shape their environment if they wished, for example by using bushfires to clear areas to encourage herds to graze nearby. Without the need for static property, there was less anxiety about possessions being linked to survival, so warfare was less endemic than in modern societies. There is proof that humans at this time, following a hunter-gathering way of life were culturally diverse, intelligent, and could even pool resources to build fantastic structures. For example, the Gobekli Tepe Temple was built in 9,500BC before widespread agriculture.

The agricultural revolution began around 9,500-8,500BC in Southeast turkey, western Iran and the Levenant, though it was a phenomenon that cropped up in all corners of the globe quite individually. The idea itself seems a simple one - people began to discover that they could cultivate certain types of plant and by doing so, allow themselves to create a stable source of food that they could, in theory, rely on.
So far, so logical.
But, as Harari argues in 'Sapiens', humanity's choice to move into agricultural production was, in the end, the biggest mistake that humanity has made. Instead of improving our lives, it drastically reduced our quality of lives and set us on a path that was impossible to walk back from.

The Dark Side of the Agricultural Revolution

No one can fault the logic behind the agricultural revolution: people were simply trying to work nature into providing more food for them. But in tying themselves to the land and in forcing themselves into back-breaking seasonal work humanity lost much of it's freedom, encouraged greater warfare and effectively destroyed the variety of their diet and leisure. Now that humanity were dependant on one particular crop for their diet, a huge swathe of anxiety followed.

Cultivating wheat, for example, took from dawn until dusk. If the wheat got sick, humans had to worry about the sickness and invest time and effort into curing it. If the rains didn't come the humanity would starve because of the drought's destruction of their one real food source. Wheat demanded perfect ground so humans broke their backs clearing fields and weeding away competitors. Days were no longer flexible, but were forced into routines that forced humans to worry and plan years and decades into the future. If someone threatened the land that they had put all the effort into, everything could be lost at once. Retaliation was brutal because running away was simply not an option. 

The aim was to create more food so that the individual societies could prosper, but even in this the revolution failed. While agriculture allowed the larger production of one type of food, in line the settlement and reliance on this meant that the human population swelled. Instead of human population being controlled by the resources of the environment that they lived on, agriculture warped the environment into a factory. While human population could grow, this meant that - should the one vital link the the new much shorter food chain collapse - humans died in their thousands. Hunting and gathering, like most animals, had natural fertility checks: if a woman breast fed a child for four years or so, she was less likely to fall pregnant and when food was scarce puberty occurred later. In agricultural societies children could be fed on cow milk or paste made from the crops instead, female fertility recovered more quickly, and more children could be produced whenever there weren't full-blown starvation conditions. In Hunter-gatherer societies a small band of people were maintained with steady fertility rates dependant on a shifting environment that largely plateaued it people were creative about how they pursued their food. Instead, agricultural societies could be stable for a large period, but were far more vulnerable to extreme peaks and troughs that could wipe out a thousands with one bad harvest - thousands that had literally no other way to subsist. 

Even in the peaks, when the crops were well, the quality of life was still back breaking for the majority - over time any surplus was used to feed an elite. The common farmer - the majority - in the end had a far rougher life than his ancestors and farming was to blame.


Why Choose a Lifestyle That's Worse For Us?

The agricultural revolution was never a matter of humans becoming somehow more clever and taking 'the next logical step' towards farming. The very nature of the human species is that, genetically at least, very little has changed about them: we simply haven't evolved much past the original Homo Sapiens. Once we learnt to speak, and to imagine, evolution became a secondary concern: instead of growing to adapt to our environment, Harari argues, we instead created complicated myths and social structures that allowed us to pull together and make our environment and how we responded to it work for us. This could be achieved without the need for a shift to agriculture and certainly hunter gatherers were no less intelligent than even modern people today.

So, if people were as clever as we are now, surely they noticed that they had made a bad choice? Why carry on with agriculture if humans had more back breaking work, longer hours, higher chance of starvation, less nutrition, less free time and more anxiety for warfare? Harrari suggests that the reason for this was simply time.

Around 18,000 years ago the ice age shifted and global warming took hold, creating more rain and therefore a climate more suitable for wheat to grow. Eating wheat was no simple task, it needed to be ground and to be processed in order to be edible and so people would take the crop with them to their temporary settlements to prepare. People would have camped for this 'harvest', and the wheat seeds would have found favourable conditions near humans. A camp that may have lasted five weeks would, in generations time, last a little longer and a little longer. Villages would spring up and offer the benefits of settlement such as storehouses and granaries and places to store more and more advanced tools. While initially low level agriculture would mix with hunter-gathering, it is no surprise that creative children would attempt to improve on ideas they have seen from their parents. One child might discover that using a hoe and plough was far more effective and his granddaughter might find that making use of fertiliser and fences would be more effective. As more and more effort was put in, as people became more used to a more static lifestyle, and as each generation made small improvements on the previous generation, eventually humanity was locked into a lifestyle of permanent villages and permanent farms and a weighty routine that locked them in place. People worked harder and got creative to try to have a better life. But in doing so they became more dependant and the hardest work became the bare subsistence of normality. When the population swelled past the point that hunter-gathering could support the group of humans, there was no escape. Farming was here to stay.

Is it all bad?

That's one small step for man...

Like any big mistake in life sometimes all you can do is to accept it and move on as best you can. The way the majority humanity has structured itself means that there is no viable alternative while ever there are so damn many of us. But that is where things get interesting.
the huge population is held together by creative 'myths' that allow for unprecedented social cooperation. By compartmentalising a food production method, it allows urbanisation and it also enables many sections of society to focus on other tasks than the creation of food and to co-orperate towards seemingly impossible (and 'impractical') goals that could be realised. Without the agricultural revolution there could have been no renaissance, no industrial revolution, and no silicone revolution.

Nevertheless many societies still suffer under the agricultural yolk of a low nutrition and low quality of life. As a species, we are still staggeringly overpopulated and still vulnerable to terrible drought and to the wars and psychological anxiety of having static property. Farm animals are subject to horribly stunted life-expectancies and psychological  and physical suffering. The average person simply doesn't understand the natural world around them in the same detail. Arguably, even today there are many elements of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that are superior. But we have made our beds and, lying in it, we strive to make the very best of it. While history isn't linear it is still difficult to imagine how, without the agricultural revolution, we could have ever put man on the moon.




Sources
- 'Sapiens': a brief histroy of humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari

Antikythera mechanism

History has a habit of erasing itself and sometimes our ancestors really surprise us.

Often the nuances of what really occurred throughout history is lost, often by wilful erasure or through misfortune. Western history, on the whole, has a significant preference for keeping things narrative: we like the idea of marching nobly forwards and into increasing technological and cultural sophistication. We love to think that with every generation we improve ourselves and evolve and, as a result, often we view our ancestors as primitive and - horribly- even stupid.


But, of course, they weren't. And history in reality can come in all shapes, not just linear. Sometimes the technology that we view as 'modern' existed much, much earlier and, for some reason or another was lost of future generations.



For example, the popular conception of Japan has always been one of skilled samurais and, following the Tokugawa period in Japan, guns and gaijin influence were banned. Many people, looking to Japan, view gun culture as invasive and unnatural, dragged in by foreign influence. But, in reality, guns had been a part of Japanese weaponry since 1270ad, and it was due to political influences that this technology was wilfully rejected and, eventually, forgotten. Firearm technology stalled, missing out on hundreds of years of potential development.

Niokla Telsa is another example of lost potential. A legendary figure now among geek-culture, Telsa was said to have developed to have proposed a directed-energy weapon and even been able to remote-cast energy across large distances for free: something that could have catapulted the world into what we nowadays view as science fiction. But, due to pressure and theft by Thomas Edison, among other issues, so many of these ideas were never able to be developed.

Finally, even analogue computers are thought to be far, far older than we had ever anticipated. The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism shook the world, as it showed that even the ancient Greeks had access to complex gear-work mechanisms that wouldn't resurface again for hundreds and hundreds of years and which had somehow been lost to their ancestors.
How might life had been if we had kept track of this technology and developed it?

The Antikythera Mechanism

This week I'd like to leave you in the hands of the brilliant Cracked.com, as they tell you about five fantastical ancient devices that prove that our ancestors were way more advanced than they often seem. 

The Lycurgus Cup, the Uunartoq disc, the salt drills of ancient China, the iron pillar of the Qutb Complex and Heron's programmable robots all show that our ancestors were very, very smart cookies indeed.

5 Advanced Ancient Technologies that Shouldn't Be Possible

As a Western Society, we are products of the Renaissance's fascination and deification of Classical Antiquity.

Augustus of Prima marble

 Large sections of our cultural values and what 'good taste' and 'class' comprise of are directly influenced by the romantic view of Ancient Greece and Rome that the educated upper classes held. The way they imitated the ancient artists and scholars shapes what we today view as 'beautiful' art. With the exploration of Roman art, our Renaissance ancestors discovered and prized the beautiful white statues that they uncovered of goddesses and emperors. Noting the skill involved, they in turn developed their own ways of improving and refining sculpture, but stayed true to the fine materials and ascetic - choosing pristine white marble for their own creations. The effect is beautiful and versatile and these pieces - ancient and later - are prized in countless galleries and country houses across Europe and beyond. Because of our appreciation of this aesthetic, this is how we believe sculpture should be achieved in traditional form, and we celebrate the Ancient Greek and Roman's 'refined' taste.

However, it seems that the reality of Ancient taste contrast jarringly with what we nowadays view as 'classical' sculpture...in fact we've been conditioned to view the reality as really quite garish.

Introducing the painted statues of Ancient Greece and Rome:

Augustus of Prima painted replica

 Countless Ancient status have been unearthed over the years, but when one was found with what appeared to be ancient paint pigments still clinging to its surface archaeologists and scientists banded together to analyse what this meant for our view of ancient art. One of the pigments in question was 'Egyptian Blue' and, through using advanced ultraviolet techniques to deconstruct what colours remained on the statue, it was identified to be a mix of skin colour - having been added in small amounts to pinks, whites and yellows to create a 'realistic' tone.

Realistically painted version of Caligula (31-37AD)
Reconstruction by Matthew Brennan, Virtual World Heritage Laboratory.

The above sculpture of Caligula, for example, was already very rare, being one of only two complete statues of the infamous emperor. When the University of Virginia set about trying to discover more about how this statue was coloured, the historical significance was poignant. Through colour analysis they discovered that Caligula is likely to have had brown hair. The use of gilt patterns shows some of the opulence of the statues and goes some way to explaining, for example, how they must have affected the subjected populations in the cities that displayed them. These pagan or political images were not imposing but ultimately blank slabs of white, but were instead bold, loud and potentially even lifelike.

“It is interesting to think about what kind of charge [these statues] must have had for Jews of the time,” commented Peter Schertz, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: “Jewish prohibition against idolatrous images must have made the appearance of classical statues both very frightful and, for some, somewhat seductive.”

Through all the various studies of these ancient statues, Ultraviolet light has been especially useful in discerning patterns and in the occasions when colours were visible. However to track each colour sometimes the scientists had to analyse deeper down to the very chemical compounds that made each pigment.

 In  galleries and auction houses often valuable old paintings are analysed to determine authenticity, and one manner is to look for particular organic elements in the paint pigments. Hundreds or even thousands of years ago, particular plants and materials were used to create particular colours and their presence shows that the art in question is the genuine article. In the same way, those studying the statues could work backwards by identifying what organic elements were present in the pigments: get the right combination and you would be able to identify what colour was used in that area.

We might ask why bother with such expensive material as marble if one was only going to paint it and, really, it's difficult to be sure. Some academics have suggested that the paint may have been fine enough to have enhanced the natural luminescence of the marble. Others suggest that the quality of the material was focused more on allowing for greater quality of sculpture, and that painting the already expensive material was seen to enhance its beauty and value spiritually rather than detract form it, even if it did hide some of the marble's attractive plain elements.

Painted ancient statues are now. admittedly, quite old news: Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulricke Koch-Brinkmann, for example, have spent over 20 years studying and painstakingly recreating classical statues to bring together this revelation...yet it is always quite a shock to the modern observer to see such a rejection of the colourless marble art that we know and love. It certainly goes to prove that the ancient world was never dull.

Istanbul Museum recreation of the Alexander Sarcophagus

Sources
- BBC4 Treasures of Ancient Rome
- True Colours
- The Ugly Truth
- Weird Science uncovers ancient art's true colours
- Was this Roman Sculpture of Gaius Caligula Painted?
- Greek Statues and their Technicolour Dreamcoats