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15 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
A reading from old Danish folklore which may interest people, of a great battle on western Zealand which, though mythical, is rife with old remembrances. This story was collected in the 1800s.
The very spot today
Note several things in this tale - the peasants of 19th-century Zealand still knew the barrows were associated with paganism, and that ancient warriors were buried in them. The common motif associating barrows with giants is present, but mixed with a more historical element.
More fascinating yet, perhaps is the occurrence here, in this tale compiled alongside otherwise rather rustic just-so stories, of what is clearly a reflex of the widespread fairytale motif of the 'girdle of invulnerability', found also in the Gawain poem

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Tristan Rapp Profile picture
16 Nov
One of the craziest points of history/ethnology is & will remain to me that a Celtic language was at one pointed spoken in the central regions of what is now Turkey. They were the Galatians of Epistle-fame

Not only that, but their language may have survived longer than Gaulish ImageImage
Their place-names included things such as Drunemeton, which shares a root with the word 'Druid', and Acitorigiaco, 'Settlement of Acitorix', to which a more classically Gaulish-sounding name can hardly be mustered.

For a time, the Galatians ruled Ankara. Image
One of the first peoples to be Christianised, the Galatians had prior to this fought the Galatian War, wherein they allied with the Greek state of Pergamon against the expanding Rome. Probably the Celts are the only ppl of Northwestern Europe to appear in the Bible. Image
Read 5 tweets
Tristan Rapp Profile picture
15 Nov
Some might say the only thing swinging here is the media reports, not the bulk of the evidence. *That* has been clear to interested parties for a while
I've not seen in the last decade one study arriving at a climate-induced extinction for the mammoth that is not either a) not even a direct study of extinction causality or b) profoundly methodologically flawed
I'll repeat my request from many times prior - show me a study arriving at a climatic cause that actually addresses the existence of the past glacials and interglacials, as well as the temporal disjunction of the Weichsel-Holocene extinctions. Show me 1.
Read 4 tweets
Tristan Rapp Profile picture
14 Nov
If you ever feel academic discussion has gotten polarised & politicised today, think back to the time Nicolas Fréret, an 18th-century French scholar, was thrown in the Bastille for several months for asserting the Franks to have been a Germanic tribe, and not adventuring Trojans. Image
Clearly, philology was a slightly heftier topic back then.
Why yes gospodin komissar, my latest readings indicate the Rus were indeed in origin a Norse tribe from eastern Scandinavia, a fascina- wait, where are you taking me? Image
Read 6 tweets
Tristan Rapp Profile picture
11 Nov
The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water, famously possessing even an endemic species of seal. Yet did you know it used to be far, far larger? During much of the Pleistocene, its area more than doubled. It even seems to have until quite recently housed whales.
Dolphin-fossils are known from the Quaternary of the Caspian, and artistic evidence in the form of the Gobustan Rock Art, dating to between 5-20kya, seems to portray some large marine mammal. Also seabirds, plausible guillemots, seem evidenced
Also the origin of the Caspian seal is something of a mystery. It, along with the equally isolated Baikal seal, seems to have radiated around the late Pliocene, just at the start of the Ice Age, but how exactly it got there is, as with the dolphins, a great mystery.
Read 5 tweets
Tristan Rapp Profile picture
10 Nov
It is a rather interesting fact that Rhododendron, despite its common status as an 'invasive' species nowadays, and its undeniable deleterious environmental consequences, is in fact native to the British isles, having occurred there in the Eemian. ImageImage
How can this be explained? Few studies to my knowledge have been carried out explicitly on the subject, but it seems most probable that the key thing controlling R. ponticum was also the main thing now missing from European ecosystems - large, destructive megafauna.
Likewise, though it's true that closed-canopy woods were once predominant across Western Europe, this was itself an unnatural result of human-induced megafauna extinctions. See for instance Sandom et al. (2014) comparing the Eemian to Early Holocene ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Tristan Rapp Profile picture
18 Oct
Polynesia and America - a thread.

(1) Of all the daring deeds in the history of Man, few can rival the great voyages of the Polynesians. From their origins in the west, they spread north, south, and east, ever east. Yet what of the furthest east? Were the Americas a sea too far?
(2) The origin of the Polynesians is a mystery that has long perplexed anthropologists. From vagrant Indo-Aryans to castaway Amerindians, it is the latter idea, through the exploits of Thor Heyerdahl, that has captivated the world. Genetics, however, are less kind than the public
(3) Today, we know beyond doubt that the Polynesians came, not from the Americas, but from Asia - almost certainly what is now Taiwan, and before that, the south Chinese coast.
Yet just because the Polynesians did not come *from* America, does not mean they did not go *to* it.
Read 14 tweets

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