Limerick of the Day, Jan 23

There once was a linguist named Cindi
Who spoke both Bengali and Hindi,
With fluency such
That she spoke them too much,
And was generally thought a bit windy.

limerick of the day, Jan 17

I'm a patriot, sir, through and through.
I stand for the red, white, and blough.
But if some monkey hollers
About "saving tax dollers,"
Let's return the poor beast to the zough.

The Last of the Bananas

                     Bananas around the world are dying.

                  There’s an article in the Jan 10, 2011 issue of New Yorker magazine by Mike Peed entitled “We Have No Bananas.”  It happens that 99% of all bananas produced for export are of a single cultivar—the Cavendish.  And a fungus which attacks and kills this variety, called Tropical Race Fungus Four (TRF-4) is spreading worldwide. This pathogen has already wiped out the plantations of Asia and has spread to Australia.  Most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before it becomes established in Latin America.  (Technically, a “banana tree” is not actually a tree—but I will call it a tree for this post.)

                  How did the industry become dependent on a single cultivar?  There are over 1000 varieties of banana.  But most are wild bananas whose fruit is tiny, filled with seeds, and in most cases inedible.  And most of the domesticated varieties are sterile, which makes cross breeding nearly impossible, and most are either too fragile to ship, too small, or can be eaten only if cooked.  The Cavendish is the only game in town.

                  No chemical spray or antibiotic has any effect on this fungus.   TRF-4 kills banana trees by entering the root system and then invading cells and switching on a gene already present within the cell, causing the cell to commit suicide, through apoptosis (programmed cell death).  The fungus then feasts on the dead cells, continuing until the tree trunk is consumed from within.  Yet apoptosis is a common defense mechanism which most organisms possess.  If something goes wrong with a cell, the cell is supposed to remove itself and make room for its replacement, or at least remove itself before the problem spreads to the rest of the organism.  Yet TRF-4 turns this defense against its owner.

                  The only way to stop the disease would be to start growing varieties that have natural resistance to it. To do this would mean finding a wild plant, preferably a banana plant, that has resistance, and then cross this plant with a Cavendish or some other marketable variety—to somehow insert a gene that tells the cells not to kill themselves.  But crossing anything with the Cavendish might not be possible because the Cavendish is sterile.  It bears fruit without fertilization, and it produces no seeds.  (In fact, its lack of seeds is what makes it marketable).  It is sterile because it has three sets of chromosomes. It is a triploid.  It originated from an accidental cross between two normal, seed producing wild varieties.  New Cavendish trees are grown from suckers which remain when a banana tree is cut down.

                  Although Alexander the Great introduced some kind of banana to Europe in 327 BC, the banana as we know it was brought to the United States in 1870.  The cultivar was from Jamaica and was called the Gros Michel. It was well received and by 1910 Americans were eating 40 million bunches a year, and vast tracts of South American jungle had been planted with Gros Michel bananas.  But in the mid 1920s, these plantations were being attacked by a fungus, TRF-1, and in about thirty years they were mostly destroyed.   What saved the industry was the Cavendish.  This plant, growing in the private greenhouse of the Duke of Devonshire, was from a cutting in a nineteenth century garden in China. 

                  The Cavendish was in most ways less desirable than Gros Michel.  The fruit was harder to ship, spoiled more quickly, was less tasty, required artificial ripening with ethylene gas, and the plants required heavy pesticide use.  But it was resistant to Tropical Race Fungus One, so it was used.  If only the Cavendish were also resistant to Tropical Race Fungus Four.   Eighty-seven percent of all bananas grown are not for export.  They are eaten locally, and they are of many different cultivars, so fungus is not much of a problem. 

                  In 1960, United Fruit Company, seeing that a replacement for the Cavendish would eventually be needed, opened a research center in Honduras, headed by Phil Rowe.  They hoped to develop a cultivar that would be marketable, shippable,  could be grown efficiently, and would be fungus resistant.  After 40 years of effort, Mr. Rowe had made little progress, and in 2001, he hanged himself.  The center he founded is now a non-profit and is continuing his work, headed by Juan Fernando Aguilar. They are still using conventional plant breeding techniques and have not lost hope.  But plant breeding with plants presumed to be sterile is not easy.  About one Cavendish banana out of every 10,000 will actually produce a seed, if you expose Cavendish plants to massive amounts of wild pollen.  So you must sort through tons of banana pulp, running it all through a sieve to find that one seed, and then get it to grow.

                  In Brisbane, Australia, a team led by James Dale of Queensland University of Technology is trying to solve the problem with genetic engineering. They hope to find a plant with resistance to TRF-4, and splice its resistance gene into a common soil bacterium. Then they will allow the bacterium to invade banana cells in a culture, so as to place the gene within the banana cell. They will then kill the bacterium with an antibiotic.   If a live plant could then be cultured from this altered cell, they will have what they want.

                  But even if they succeed, they will still have two problems:  First, present technology would only allow a transgenic plant in which the foreign genes would be expressed throughout the whole plant, not just in the roots.  So it’s not clear that the resulting fruit would be demonstrably safe to eat. (And even if it could be proven safe, most consumers might wish to avoid it.)  Second, we would still have the main problem, which is monoculture.  These fungi have been around for thousands of years.  As long as banana trees were scattered throughout the jungle, no one fungus that specialized in attacking one kind of plant could ever become a pandemic. But when the same cultivar is planted for thousands of square miles, then once a pathogen gets started there is nothing in its path to stop it.

                  

Shop Class as Soul Craft, a Review

     I have just finished reading a book which I wish to recommend.  The book is Shop Class As Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford. If you liked Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, then you'll love this book. It's a study of what's wrong with work in the modern world, and why most workers aren't very happy.  The author has an interesting background. As a child, he was raised in a hippie commune in Berkeley, CA.   He got a BA in physics, and then a PHD in philosophy, and worked for a while in a Washington think tank. But he quit that job to open a motorcycle repair shop.  And for many years, before he finished his PHD, he had worked off and on as an electrician's helper.

    He concludes that as we move away from work using tools to solve "one of a kind," hands-on problems in the real material world, we move away from the only kind of work that every gave workers a sense of personal empowerment or pride of workmanship.   He says that the skilled trades are the last refuge of meaningful work, and goes on to prove this with both practical examples and persuasive philosophical arguments. 

  This is a guy who says some of the things I have always said--only says it beautifully.   You're going to love it.  

None Wept For Cahokia

            If you’ve never heard of Cahokia, it was a large pre-Columbian city located across the Mississippi river from present day St. Louis, Missouri.  In the eleventh century CE, it was larger than any city in Europe at that time.  But it was abandoned sometime after 1250 CE, and by the time Europeans arrived, except for several huge earthen pyramids and other massive earthworks, there was almost no trace of it.

            I’ve just finished reading CAHOKIA, by Timothy Pauketat.  Mr. Pauketat, an archaeologist, provides the story of the modern archaeological studies of these ruins, and what he believes we have learned about this ancient city. 

            Even before the Lewis and Clark expedition about 1803, European explorers noticed these gigantic earthworks and found them extremely puzzling.  The largest pyramid, a flat-topped rectangular pyramid now called Monk’s Mound, was over 100 feet high, had a volume of 25 million cubic feet, and covered 15 acres.  It was immediately apparent that building these things would require the organized labor of thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands.  But in the early nineteenth century, most tribes in Mid-North America were hunter-gatherers who were at least semi-nomadic, who rarely lived in groups of more than a few hundred, and who had little in the way of any hierarchical political structures.  Most Americans of European descent assumed that this had always been the case, so many argued that these flat-topped earth pyramids must be natural land forms.  Others, noting that even though badly eroded, one could see that they had originally been laid out in perfectly straight lines, and aligned with the four cardinal directions, conceded that they were made by man, but refused to believe that the Native American tribes could have done it.  So they began speculating about some “lost civilization” that might have built them.

            By the mid-nineteenth century, many earthworks had been dug up by amateur pot hunters, and human bones had been unearthed.  By then, the pyramids were being leveled to make room for cities and roads and farms.  The next explanation, one that persisted for a century, was that Indian Tribes (Native American Peoples) had indeed built them, but not as part of a city. The whole complex, they said, was merely a place where many tribes would meet for some annual festival, like an Indian version of Woodstock.   Not until the 1950s did the archaeology of the site progress to the point that the foundations of thousands of single-family sized huts were unearthed.  These huts, complete with hearths and storage pits, established that tens of thousands of families had lived there.  When this information was published, most archaeologists were reluctant to believe it, since it totally contradicted everything that had been taught about Native American life before Columbus.

            What appears to have happened at Cahokia, according to Pauketat is this:  Most parts of the U.S. that are being farmed today, were being farmed by about 800 CE, though usually not very intensively. And the main crop was corn (maize), just as it is today.  At about 800 CE, a small city was established on the Mississippi flood plain near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and was supported by adjacent farm fields also located on that flood plain.  Then about 1054, the entire city was razed and a new city, four times as large, was built on top of the old Cahokia.   The new town could hold at least 10,000 residents within its wooden walls.  But counting the suburbs, the city was five times that big.  And this population center was fed and supported by innumerable peasant farmers spread out fifty miles in every direction, with some farms that had a clear connection to Cahokia located well over one hundred miles away.           

             Along with the temples and houses were huge courtyards and playing fields. The largest was 900 feet by 1600 feet.  Cahokians danced, played at sports, feasted, and also conducted ritual human sacrifices--regularly, and on a grand scale.  In one burial vault, a high-status male was buried with 52 young females, aged 15-20 years.  Often, sacrificial victims were killed by having their skulls bashed in with a blunt instrument, probably a stone mace.  Analysis of the teeth showed that these young female victims were of a different ethnic group than the Cahokians.  The captives were probably taken from one of the subject peoples who lived on their periphery. 

            Sometimes a ritual slaughter seemed to involve the deliberate extinction of an entire blood line. There, the victims were other Cahokians, and probably very high status Cahokians.  Men, women, children, and even infants were decked out in ritual finery, and then bludgeoned to death.   

            Analysis of the bones of Cahokians shows that the residents of the city were well fed and healthy; but the same cannot be said about some of the peasant farmers in the surrounding countryside. Small farms were found not only in the flood plain, but on upland prairies over a hundred miles from the city.  And objects found there show a direct connection with the city. Analysis of the bones buried there showed signs of the kind of extreme malnutrition which would occur when people are fed a diet of only corn (maize.)  So while life was good in Cahokia (if you weren’t part of the sacrifice),  life was miserable in the small farmsteads which provided Cahokia its food, and also wove its cloth.  This means that Cahokia was not just a city, but an empire, or at least a city-state with imperial pretensions.  If Cahokians could not project military power for a hundred miles in every direction, then it is unlikely they would have been able to confiscate food from farmers located that distance from the city, especially if these farmers were nearly starving themselves.   And these small farming villages would not have voluntarily surrendered their daughters to be ritually slaughtered--unless they were being crushed under the heel of an unimaginably repressive empire.

            When the facts about Cahokia became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, no one was really happy to hear them.  Most Americans of European descent would prefer to think that the owners of the continent they had appropriated were simple, child-like folk—not the engineers of an empire.  And most Native Americans were saddened to discover that their own ancestors had been capable of such unspeakable cruelty to their own people.  So nothing that was learned was what anyone wanted to hear.

            But Cahokia went as suddenly as it had come. Some time about in the late thirteenth century, the city was abandoned as was the surrounding farmland.  And the entire region remained nearly devoid of humans for two centuries.  The author does not speculate as to why this happened, but one reason would seem obvious.  If you grow maize year after year, the soil, not matter how rich it was to start with, will eventually become depleted. There are areas in Oaxaca and Chiapas, where maize was originally domesticated, where the same plots have been farmed for 4,000 years and are still fertile. But they use a multi-culture.  Maize, beans, squash, and chilies are grown at the same time in the same field.  The beans fix nitrogen for the maize; the maize provides a pole for the beans to climb; and the squash leaves provide a ground cover to mulch out the weeds.  And a diet of this combination of plants provides a nearly balanced diet.   And if the food is consumed locally by those who produce it, and if all animal and human wastes are returned to the field, then no minerals leave the farm.

            But if you grow only maize and send most of it to a far away city to be eaten by others, then the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium in this maize is making a “one way trip” away from the farm, and sooner or later there is so little left in the soil that nothing will grow. This is the most economical explanation of the death of Cahokia.

            The author finds it interesting that none of the tribes of Native Americans today have any tales, songs, or folklore of any kind which seem to mention this city. He says that it seems that they made a conscious effort to forget it. But why wouldn’t they?  For masses on the bottom of the system, the whole thing probably seemed like a bad dream and when it was over they wanted to forget it had ever happened.  And for the elites—we don’t know how it all ended.  But the elites may have fled for their lives.  If so, they would have spent the rest of their lives denying that they had ever been Cahokians, lest they be torn limb from limb by former peasants.  No one wept for Cahokia.

The Angels and the Unicorn

            Most twenty –first century English speakers imagine themselves to be rational, logical beings.  Yet we employ a language strewn with references to things which no one presumes to exist.  We read and hear words like “angel” and “demon,” “unicorn,” and “fairy.” Yet even when seriously drunk, few people believe to have ever seen such phenomena.  And almost no one over nine years old believes in their existence. 

            One could argue that these words entered the language in an earlier, more innocent age, when people actually believed in such things, and the words live on as fossil remains of long extinct concepts or perhaps as metaphors still useful in the modern world.           

            Yet our modern world itself continues to add to this inventory of words which precisely describe the non-existent.  How many science fiction plots could hold together without the glue of “faster than light-speed travel,” often euphemized as “warp drive” or “hyperspace drive,” or “space folding; ”  (not to mention “transporter beams.”)   We need these concepts as plot devices because we have learned two very inconvenient facts:  One; there is no habitable planet other than Earth in our own star system.  Two, all other star systems are a very inconvenient distance away.   Any plot in which the time required to travel to anywhere worth going would take the greater part of a human lifetime would not be very fast-paced, and would probably not hold our interest.

            But what would be the result if, just for one year, we resolved to abstain from reading, writing, or speaking any word describing that which is non-existent.  Mind you, I do not rule out things which do not now exist, simply because they are beyond our current technology. The Sci-fi films like  Gattaca and Jurassic Park invoke technologies that do not presently exist—and perhaps will never exist.  But, unlike “warp drive,” they are not mathematically impossible technologies.  Supposing we just swore off, for one year only, the impossible. Is there some basic human need to imagine beyond the possible?  When ancient poets spun tales of gods and heroes, was this just “bubble gum for the mind?”  Or is there a fundamental human need understand what is possible—and then pretend to live in a world beyond it? 

Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi, a review.

As promised, this is the cat's last book review of 2010.  I believe it is the strangest, and perhaps the most interesting non-fiction work I've ever read.

            Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi  by Roger L. Jewel

            A Review and synopsis by The Cat.

            A few years ago, a friend of mine, a geologist, handed me a book and said, “Here—read this.   I think you’ll find it interesting.”       He neither endorsed nor contested the views of the author.  He just said, “Read it and tell me what you think.”   He went on to explain that the book did not belong to him—it was borrowed and would have to be returned in one week.  He also mentioned that it was out of print and could not be easily replaced.    I asked, “What is it about?”

            He explained that the shores of Lake Superior are dotted with abandoned copper mines, and some of these mines were worked thousands of years ago.  Though the mining methods were primitive, using stone hammers and fire, the mines were so numerous that the total amount of copper removed was still massive—some estimates run as high as one billion pounds.  Recent, more careful estimates put the figure at closer to 50 million pounds.

            Still, that’s many times the amount that the Indians could have ever used. In most parts of North and South America, the Indians used no copper at all. Where it was used, it was used in tiny amounts for personal ornaments. Tribes living near the Great Lakes, where copper was easily obtained, made a few wood-working tools and a few arrow points. But that still accounts for less than 2 percent of those 50 million pounds of copper. So where did it go?  This is a question that has puzzled archaeologists for a hundred years.

            This is the question that Roger Jewel addresses in his book. He assumes that it was the Indians who were mining it, or possibly Indians in collaboration with someone else.  But if the Indians weren’t using it themselves, then who were they trading it to, and for what were they trading it?

            Carbon 14 tests on fragments of the wooden ladders left behind consistently yield dates showing that mining activity began about 2,500 BCE, and continued uninterrupted till about 1,200 BCE, and then abruptly stopped.  As soon as I read this, I said, “Aha!  They were supplying copper to the sea traders from the Eastern Mediterranean!”   The sea trade in the Aegean began after 3,000 BCE,  first with Sumerians, then Minoan/Cypriots, Mycenaeans, Canaanites,  and others.  But it all ended about 1,200 BCE, when a Dorian invasion wiped out every civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean except Egypt.

            The mining activity resumed about 1,000 BCE, and then petered out about two hundred years later.  Jewel doesn’t mention it, but this is exactly what we should expect, since by 1,000 BCE, the Phoenicians had built a trade empire similar to the one which had collapsed earlier. (The name “Phoenician” suggests that it may have been the same empire, since the name phoenix refers to a mythical bird which perishes in fire, and then rises from its own ashes.) But about 800 BCE iron smelting technology improved, and the price of iron dropped sharply, and its use became widespread. After that, the Iron Age had begun, and there was less demand for brass or the copper and tin needed to make it.

            When you consider the dates when these mines were used, it seems likely that the sea traders from the Eastern Mediterranean were the culprits.  Jewel draws the same conclusion, for the same reasons.  No other part of the world had the technology to build ocean-going ships as early as 2,500 BCE.     And if the copper had been supplied directly to the Egyptians, then the trade would not have abruptly stopped about 1,200 BCE.

            When the Bronze Age began, rich surface deposits in the Near East were quickly exhausted.  As copper became precious, traders went searching for new supplies, first to the British Isles, and then, according to Jewel, to North America.  This, he believes, was the copper that fueled the Bronze Age.

            The copper in question occurs as native copper—not just copper ore.  Chunks of pure copper weighing several ton were left behind by the miners because they had no means of easily moving them, or of cutting smaller pieces off.

            The mining process used was simple.  The area has old lava flows that contain copper, which was deposited by water in the cracks in the lava.  The miners would find a copper vein on the surface of an old lava flow and then build a huge fire on top of it. After a few days of continuous fire, they would clear away the ashes and dump cold water on it. This fractures the rock so that when cool, you can simply pick up large chunks of rock and smash them with stone hammers to remove the copper.  The mines were usually cylindrical holes sunk vertically into the rock, 5 to 30 feet deep and 3 to 30 feet in diameter. Many of the abandoned mines have been re-worked and expanded in historic times, which obliterates all traces of the original mine.  Therefore, the amount of copper removed by ancient miners may be much larger than estimates based on the number of mines still there.  As for evidence that the copper was shipped to the Mediterranean, Mr. Jewel supplies a few facts and a lot of conjecture.  But his conjectures fit the facts perfectly, and it’s difficult to conceive of any alternative explanation that would fit them at all.

            If Mr. Jewel’s conjecture is correct, then we should expect to find Minoan artifacts in Michigan, because if boatloads of copper were being shipped to the Near East, then boatloads of whatever  they traded for would have been shipped from the Near East to Michigan—and some of it should still be there. Have we found such things there?  There have been a few finds, but not the vast amounts we should expect.  That’s part of the puzzle.

            From one site that dates to nearly 2,700 BCE (the earliest site so far discovered), they found a cast copper double bladed axe which precisely matches the design of Minoan axes used as a religious symbol at that period. One site, dated to 1,500 BCE, yielded a beautifully made copper serpent.  But Native Americans did not begin using the serpent as a symbol till the Mound Culture, which was somewhat later. Yet this symbol was widely used in the Near East, and was the symbol of the goddess Astarte.

            One piece of evidence that can’t be dismissed are the signatures on an old Indian land deed.   An official New Hampshire land deed, dated 1681, conveys a parcel of Indian land to colonists who purchased it. Some of the Indians could write their names in English, and did so.  Others claimed they would prefer to sign their names in their own written language. The marks they placed on the deed were dismissed by the colonists as random scribbles made by savages pretending they could write. But these marks have now been discovered to be a form of an ancient Cypriot language.

            Jewell quotes the late Dr. Barry Fell, a Harvard epigrapher, for several pages on this subject:

            Fell says that about a dozen different systems of writing were in use by North American Indians when the colonists arrived. In the early nineteenth century, a missionary, James Evans, adopted an Algonquian written language for teaching the Christian religion to Indians. Evans was later wrongly credited with “inventing” the Cree script. But by translating the entire Bible into Cree, he simply preserved this script, and it survives today in Cree tribal lands.

            Dr. Fell says that in 1978, some Basque scholars at the museum in San Sebastian contacted him about the inscriptions on some old Basque tablets.   Noticing that the symbols were identical to the Cree Syllabary,  he tried substituting  Cree sound values, and the resulting language sounded like Basque. He sent these translations to leading Basque linguist, Imanol Agire, who confirmed that it was indeed Basque. Thus, by using the Cree Syllabary, we can now translate ancient Iberian inscriptions.  The Grand Basque Encyclopedia now describes this connection.

            Dr. Fell says that the Indian treaties were signed in a script called Mamalohikan, which was in use till at least 1727 in Northern Main, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.  Fell says that Mamalohikan symbols are from an ancient Cypriot system of writing, first deciphered in 1871. This system died out in Europe after the reign of Alexander the Great, when the Greek alphabet replaced many other forms of writing.  Therefore this script would have to have been brought to the new world before Alexander.

            Dr. Fell says that though this information is rejected by most archaeologists, it is now firmly enough established among European Linguists as to be incorporated into their most learned publications.

            Jewell then cites other cultural evidence.  He points out that the megalith builders, active in Europe during this time frame, built structures all over Europe. But the main concentration seems to be near sea coasts. Similar structures are found in the new world.  He provides a map with a black dot placed at each megalith site. The pattern shows dots along the coastline of the Mediterranean, from the Aegean and Greece, to Italy, Sicily, and Iberia, up the Atlantic coast and all over the British Isles, and then they are found again along the coast of Nova Scotia and Labrador, down the St Laurence River, and around the Great Lakes.  They are also found in the Hudson River valley, and along the coast of New England.

            Jewell observes that after the melting of the last glacier, the removal of weight from the earth’s crust has caused the land to be uplifted from time to time, and that these uplifts have changed the drainage of the Great Lakes many times. One of these uplifts occurred about 1,600 BCE.  Prior to that time, the main drainage of Lake Superior was through the Ottawa and St Laurence rivers. One could sail from the Atlantic to Lake Superior using this route. But the uplift cut off this route and blocked the outflow till the lake level rose to where it began draining through the Hudson River system.  So both the St Laurence and the Hudson, at some point in time, provided a sea route to Lake Superior.

            Jewell says that religion in both the Mediterranean and the British Isles involved the worship of two deities: the male sun god, Baal, whose symbol is the bull, and the female earth goddess, Astarte (Ishtar,) who is usually depicted as a bare-breasted woman holding a serpent. (He says that the pagan feast of Beltane is really “Baaltane.”)  These symbols are often abstracted to a minimalist depiction of just bull horns or serpents.

            Stone dolmans, usually a large boulder set on three smaller stones, have been found in the Great Lakes region.  Jewell says they are inscribed with a sign identical to the markings on similar dolmans in Europe.  He says the inscriptions are the sign of Baal.  And on both sides of the Atlantic, we find sun calendar chambers.   These are nearly horizontal shafts cut into hillsides so that on a single day each year, usually the spring equinox, the sun’s rays strike the end of the shaft.  According to Jewell, this was not just for time-keeping, but was a religious observance. When the phallic shaft of light from the male sun god penetrated and impregnated mother earth, new life would spring forth.

            One of the most striking items of evidence cited by Jewell to prove ancient trade contacts between Europe and America was the discovery in 1992 that Egyptian mummies contain traces of nicotine and cocaine, both of which are found only in New World plants.  In 1992, Dr. Svetla Balabanova was hired to run drug tests on hair samples taken from mummies.  Dr. Balabanova, of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm, is highly respected in her field, having pioneered groundbreaking methods for detecting drugs in hair.  When the first tests were positive for both nicotine and cocaine, she assumed there must be an error.  She repeated the tests, using the most reliable method known.  This involves first washing the hair in pure alcohol, and then testing the alcohol and the hair separately.  If the alcohol tests negative but the hair tests positive, then the drug in the hair could not have come from outside contamination.  This test is accepted in any court on the planet as positive proof.  But even this test yielded the same results.  Finally, she sent the sample to several other labs, but they all tested positive.  When she published the results, she was scoffed at.  But Rosalie David, Keeper of the Egyptology, Manchester Museum, heard of the results and decided to have samples from the mummies in her own museum tested. They all tested positive for nicotine.

            But even with all of this evidence, one part of the puzzle that would still remain unsolved is this:   What did the Indians receive in exchange for all that copper, and where is it? Why has it left no trace?  Fortunately, there is one more line of evidence:  DNA.   There are four main haplogroups found in mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, called A, B, C, and D. These are of Asian origin.   But there is another type, called X, which is mostly a southern European type, and which is found either in very small amounts or not at all in most Indian populations. 

            But Algonquian speaking people, especially Chippewa and Ojibwa, have a higher percentage of this European type; in some tribal groups it’s as high as 20%.  Jewell doesn’t say so, but since this European genotype comes only from mitochondrial DNA, we can guess what was being traded—wives!  Mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the female line; only European women could have brought those genes to America.

            It’s unlikely that these women would have come here as wives of colonists, because if colonies had been established and maintained for 1,500 years, they would still be here.  Or at least some trace of them would still be here.  And colonists would have demanded some goods from the Mediterranean in exchange for their labor.  And even if they were slaves, a supply of goods would have been required to maintain them, and these goods would have left a record.  Instead of the paltry handful of Minoan artifacts found near the Great Lakes, we’d be finding tons of it.

            Jewell stops short of saying so, but the most economical explanation is that the European women who brought these genes to America were simply slave girls who were sold to the Indians as wives in exchange for the copper. Slavery was the accepted practice all over Europe at that time, and women were a tradable commodity.  (As late as the 10^th century AD, Vikings were capturing Irish girls and selling them to the Moors in Spain.) Since the Mediterranean people at that time were people with olive skin, dark hair and dark eyes, their offspring would not have looked much different from Indians. We should not expect to see blond haired blue eyed Ojibwas. Before the Celtic and Gothic invasions, Europeans did not have those features.  

            For me, Jewell’s book only reinforces a conclusion I’ve had for some time:  The reasonable question is not, “Was there ever a period of trans-Atlantic trade in ancient times?”   The question should be, “Was there ever a period without such trade contacts?”  The answer is yes.  From the onset of the “dark ages” until the voyages of Columbus, there was a suspension of trade contacts for a thousand years.  A similar suspension of about 200 years followed the Dorian invasions of 1,200 BCE.  Except for that, Europe and America have had at least limited trade contacts for most of the last 5,000 years.

            One group that never completely stopped sailing to America was the Basque whaling community.  These people, who are probably descended from Eastern Mediterranean sea traders, continued to visit the shores of eastern Canada.  But they never ventured more than a few miles inland, and had minimal contacts with the natives.  Their settlements, winter fishing camps, left little trace except crude stone shelters.  They were not conquerors, merchants, or colonists. If they traded with the Indians at all, they supplied them nothing that changed their technology or changed their history.  And when they returned to Europe, they sold their whale oil and ivory without telling anyone where they got it. So their voyages had no effect on the history of either continent.

            Still, on Columbus’s first voyage, a large part of his crew was made up of Basque whaling captains.  Columbus went out of his way to recruit Basque whaling captains.  Why?

            Ancient Mines of Kicthi-Gummi is awkwardly organized, poorly written, and the printing is so bad that most of the drawings, maps, and photos are nearly unreadable. Yet it is still a fascinating read.