Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest

The revelation of an ancient city in a valley in the Mosquitia mountains, of Honduras, one of the last scientifically unexplored regions on Earth, was a different story. This was the first time a large archaeological site had been discovered in a purely speculative search using a technology called lidar, or “light detection and ranging,” which can map terrain through the thickest jungle foliage, an event I chronicled in a story for the magazine in 2013. As a result, this discovery revealed something vanishingly rare: a city in an absolutely intact, undisturbed, pristine state, buried in a rain forest so remote and untouched that the animals there appeared never to have seen people before...

Entering the ruins was a disappointment. If the Mosquitia jungle were superimposed on Times Square, the foliage would be so thick that you would have no inkling you were in the midst of a city. Even standing at the base of an earthen pyramid in the central plaza of T1, surrounded by earthworks, terracing, and mounds, I had not the slightest idea that this was the main public space of what had once been a thriving city of thousands. Only through technology did we know our location in the ruins. The chief archaeologist on the expedition, Chris Fisher, carried a sophisticated Trimble G.P.S. displaying a digital lidar map of the city with the trees removed, and our location pinpointed on it. As we moved through the jungle, Chris would check the Trimble and say, “There’s a big mound thirty feet ahead,” but we could see nothing but leaves until we practically walked into it. We had to win every foot by machete, our blades marked with stripes of pink Day-Glo tape so we could avoid one another’s slashing strokes cutting through the vegetation. Even so, we had some close calls.

On the third day, we a stumbled over a cache of objects at the base of the pyramid that would prove to be of singular importance. As we were strolling past a leafy hollow in the drenching rain, a team member spied, peeking from the leaves, the carved head of a snarling jaguar. A shout went up and everyone crowded in to see. Just poking out of the ground were the tops of dozens of stone sculptures. The objects took shape in the forest twilight: vessels with carved rims; thrones decorated with the heads of half-animal, half-human deities; bowls; and effigies. They were all almost entirely buried, with only the tops visible, like stone icebergs.

I can recall the very moment when I first saw that jaguar head coming out of the ground. Gleaming with rain, it rose up snarling, as if struggling to escape the earth. It was an image that spoke directly across the centuries—forging an immediate, emotional connection to these vanished people. What had been theoretical became real: this spirited image had been created by people who were confident, accomplished, and formidable. Standing in the gloom among the ancient mounds, I could almost feel the presence of the invisible dead...

Fisher, the expedition’s chief archaeologist, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, and an authority on both lidar and Mesoamerican culture, would eventually uncover close to five hundred sculptures and fragments in an area no larger than two hundred square feet. The objects had been left all at the same time, probably when the city was abandoned. Most of the artifacts had been ritually smashed, a common practice in the Americas for goods placed in a grave, to release their spirits. Also of significance was the statue positioned in the center of the cache—a half-human, half-vulture figure that probably represented a shaman or priest in a transformed state. Vultures, in the ancient world of Honduras, were a symbol of death and the transition to the spiritual world.

Taken together, these clues suggested that this was not a grave for an individual; it was the cenotaph for the entire city. Around 1500, something catastrophic appeared to have happened in T1 that triggered the abandonment of the city, with the survivors leaving this cache as a final offering to their gods before they departed. Here it had lain for five hundred years. But what had happened? It could not have been conquest by the Spanish, as no Spaniards (or any Europeans) had ever penetrated these remote mountain valleys.

It was, more likely, disease that had devastated this city. To understand the collapse of this mysterious civilization, we have to go back to October of 1493, when Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the New World with an enormous flotilla of seventeen ships carrying fifteen hundred men and thousands of head of livestock. Columbus and his men also unwittingly carried microscopic pathogens from Europe, to which the people of the New World had no genetic resistance. His travels throughout the Caribbean unleashed the first of a series of deadly pandemics that swept the Caribbean and Central America.

The fortress-like valley of T1, ringed by mountains, with only one point of entry, was nearly invulnerable to invasion. The people of T1 had nothing to fear from European conquest. But they were vulnerable to European diseases, especially smallpox and measles, which burned far ahead of actual European contact, triggering large population collapses. Anthropologists have documented that, between 1518 and 1550, almost ninety per cent of the native people of Honduras died of disease.

Those pathogens invaded Mosquitia via two pathways. The first was through trade. When Columbus landed in Honduras’s Bay Islands, he described a memorable sight: a huge trading canoe, eight feet wide and sixty feet long, manned by twenty‐five paddlers. The canoe was heaped with valuable trade goods: copper, flint, weapons, textiles, and beer. There was extensive maritime trade throughout the Caribbean and Central America, some of which undoubtedly went up the two main highways, the Río Plátano and the Río Patuca, into Mosquitia. There can be little doubt these traders, peddling goods from the islands and coasts, carried European pathogens into the hinterlands, where the microbes escaped into the local populations.

A second likely track of infection was the slave trade. Before slavery was restricted by the Spanish crown, in 1542, slaving parties scoured Honduras, kidnapping Indians to work plantations, mines, and households. The first slaves were captured from the islands and coasts. As disease wiped out these early captives, the Spanish raiders went deeper into the countryside to find replacements. (The African slave trade also ramped up at this time.) By the fifteen-thirties, the slavers were ravaging the Mosquito Coast and the Olancho Valley of central Honduras, destroying villages and rounding up people like cattle. On three sides—west, north, and south—the Mosquitia mountains were surrounded by slave raids. Thousands of Indians fled their villages and took refuge in the rainforest, disappearing into the mountains of Mosquitia. Some of these refugees, unfortunately, carried European disease into the otherwise well‐protected interior valleys, including T1.

If we follow this scenario to its conclusion, then sometime in the early fifteen hundreds several epidemics of disease probably swept T1 in close succession. If the mortality rates were similar to the rest of Honduras, ninety per cent of the inhabitants died of disease. The survivors, shattered and traumatized, prepared to abandon the city. Their final act was to gather up their sacred objects, arrange them at the base of the pyramid, smash them, and then depart, never to return.

UT Says 'Body Farm' Study Debunks Widely-Used Forensic Practice - The Knoxville Mercury


UT Says ‘Body Farm’ Study Debunks Widely-Used Forensic Practice

Researchers at the University of Tennessee Knoxville say a first-of-its-kind study debunks a common standard used in forensic science–a finding that could potentially impact court cases around the world.

The study conducted by UT’s Anthropology Research Facility, commonly referred to as the “Body Farm,” shows that human remains decompose at different rates and patterns than pigs and rabbits. That’s important because forensic court cases worldwide routinely use animal models to estimate the time since death for human remains, yet the new study reveals that those methods can yield flawed results since there are large variations in decay, insect activity, and scavenger activity between human bodies and non-human species, UT said in an announcement Wednesday.

“This research provides guidance to lawyers and judges concerning the admissibility of testimony by anthropologists and entomologists,” Dawnie Steadman, director of UT’s Forensic Anthropology Center and the project’s lead investigator, said in a statement.

Steadman and seven other colleagues who worked on the project have thus far presented three papers on the findings and are preparing to submit three others to the Journal of Forensic Sciences for review.