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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I don't know when Popular Mechanics started doing science articles, but this isn't the first one I've shared from them. Scientists Found a 12,000-Year-Old Monument—Turns Out It May Be Humanity’s Oldest Calendar  But just how, exactly, did it track time? And did it feature scantily-clad women each month? Carvings on a 12,000-year-old monument in Turkey appear to mark solar days and years, making it possibly the oldest solar calendar in ancient civilization. Hm, maybe it didn't have months at all, let alone chicks in fur bikinis. Also, I'll note: oldest surviving calendar. I'm fairly certain no ancient civilization just said, "You know what? Let's move these giant rocks here so they make pretty shadows depending on the time of year." No, they probably started with wood poles or something easier, then decided to make them "permanent" by creating a stone one. An ancient monument discovered in Turkey may just be an ancient monument. But, if its markings are what experts think they are, it might be the world’s oldest solar calendar. How hard is it to determine if the markings are pretty women or not? By analyzing the symbols carved onto pillars, the team believes that every “V” could represent a single day, given that one pillar featured 365 days. And among those, the summer solstice in particular was highlighted with a V worn around the neck of a bird-like beast meant to represent the summer solstice constellation during that time. This paragraph is agonizingly ambiguous. I've heard before that due to things like precession, the background stars associated with any given season change over that order of time. I also know that different cultures have, and still have, different ideas of what stars formed what pretty pictures in the sky. What's maddening here is: does the "summer solstice constellation" refer to the constellation the sun is in at the solstice, or the one at zenith at midnight (which would be the opposite side of the sky)? And while we're at it, how do they know that this particular culture interpreted one of the constellations as a "bird-like beast?" The calendar’s preoccupation with day, night, and seasonal changes may have sparked anew with a world-changing comet strike, one that experts believed occurred in roughly 10,850 B.C. and helped contribute to a mini-ice age that eliminated numerous species. Even early, pre-agricultural humans could predict things like solstices and equinoxes. A comet strike is notoriously unpredictable without modern technology. I have to wonder if sites like (probably) this one were an attempt to make sense of the random nature of certain events, by controlling the things that they thought they could. Pure speculation, really. “It appears the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe were keen observers of the sky,” Martin Sweatman, lead study researcher from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, said in a statement. This should not be surprising. We have lots of different cultures who liked to create calendars. Stonehenge is probably the most famous, but there's also the Mayan calendar and who knows how many that weren't preserved in stone? The carvings also track cycles for both the Moon and the Sun, which pre-date other calendar finds of this type by “many millennia,” the group wrote. Oh, so the lunar cycles were also part of this. The stuff up toward the beginning made it sound purely solar. The researchers believe that the temple carvings show the ancient civilization was recording dates precisely, noting how the movement of constellations across the sky differed based on the time of the year. This would be 10,000 years before Hipparchus of ancient Greece documented the wobble in the Earth’s axis in 150 BC, making this newfound calendar well ahead of its time. This makes little sense to me, but I don't know if it's me, or poor interpretation on the author's part. What this purported calendar purportedly tracks is yearly changes, not the precession that takes thousands of years to complete one cycle. But don't get me wrong: a calendar site that old would be a major development in our understanding of historical astronomy. If their findings are confirmed, anyway. Archaeologists have a strong tendency to see what they want to see, and to call any ancient artifact whose use they don't understand a "ritual tool." Even if the calendar hypothesis is wrong, which I'm not saying it is, it's still a stone thing from 12,000 years ago, and that's pretty damn cool by itself. |
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