We're no the likes o other men that work eight hours a day
I have spent nearly every waking moment of my day so far dealing with bureaucracy, but unlike the vast majority of my experiences dealing with bureaucracy, this one has been fast-moving and responsive and at one point a representative actually called me back concerned that I had not received an important piece of digital paperwork (which I had not, so she re-sent it and I filled it out and about two minutes later the original copy came through per rule of Roger Rabbit, only when it was funny). It may still come to nothing, but I can't say that they aren't taking us seriously. Have some links.
1. I had never heard of the 1971 Ibrox disaster before reading this account by a survivor. The idea that people could be funneled to their deaths like a fish-trap by nothing more than numbers and architecture and negligence—no stampede, no fire, no collapse—apparently disturbs me more than some other disasters.
2. Speaking of disasters, I had heard of Roopkund and its skeletons, but not of the more recent and even more mysterious remains sifted out from their pilgrim fellows by carbon dating and genetic analysis. The absence of any kind of local legend really makes me curious.
3. David Schraub on America as, actually, a center-left nation.
4. I took an internet quiz purporting to reveal how an audience would perceive me if I were a fictional character and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch had to ask me if I was all right because of the noise I made when confronted with the image of red Converse sneakers kicking off a skateboard and the designation "edgy step on me":
it's You. you're the edgy character with combat boots that everyone wants to step on them ( depending on what your gender is. ) you probably have a very cool style, and you're also absolutely gorgeous in a way that average people just ... aren't. you might be a little bit of an asshole, but that's ok. you get a pass because you're extremely attractive. you radiate some sort of energy that i can't describe. i'm not sure you're a real person honestly.
5. Have some amazing photos of shipwrecks.
As a person who has never been interested in actors because I don't know them and does not crush on characters because they don't exist, I wish at the risk of TMI to register my absolute confusion at waking up from a piercingly sexual dream of Van Heflin in Act of Violence (1948). I adore that movie and his performance in it, but I wouldn't sleep with Frank Enley if, like Mary Astor's Pat, I got paid for it. I would almost hope it's a metaphor, except then I can't think for what. Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to cover that guy.
1. I had never heard of the 1971 Ibrox disaster before reading this account by a survivor. The idea that people could be funneled to their deaths like a fish-trap by nothing more than numbers and architecture and negligence—no stampede, no fire, no collapse—apparently disturbs me more than some other disasters.
2. Speaking of disasters, I had heard of Roopkund and its skeletons, but not of the more recent and even more mysterious remains sifted out from their pilgrim fellows by carbon dating and genetic analysis. The absence of any kind of local legend really makes me curious.
3. David Schraub on America as, actually, a center-left nation.
4. I took an internet quiz purporting to reveal how an audience would perceive me if I were a fictional character and
spatch had to ask me if I was all right because of the noise I made when confronted with the image of red Converse sneakers kicking off a skateboard and the designation "edgy step on me":
it's You. you're the edgy character with combat boots that everyone wants to step on them ( depending on what your gender is. ) you probably have a very cool style, and you're also absolutely gorgeous in a way that average people just ... aren't. you might be a little bit of an asshole, but that's ok. you get a pass because you're extremely attractive. you radiate some sort of energy that i can't describe. i'm not sure you're a real person honestly.
5. Have some amazing photos of shipwrecks.
As a person who has never been interested in actors because I don't know them and does not crush on characters because they don't exist, I wish at the risk of TMI to register my absolute confusion at waking up from a piercingly sexual dream of Van Heflin in Act of Violence (1948). I adore that movie and his performance in it, but I wouldn't sleep with Frank Enley if, like Mary Astor's Pat, I got paid for it. I would almost hope it's a metaphor, except then I can't think for what. Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to cover that guy.
no subject
No, that's fair. It's the first article I've read at The New Yorker this month, so it was free.
If you let yourself engage in unfettered speculation, what *do* you think the explanation is?
"By the middle of 2017, it was apparent that the Roopkund bones belonged to three distinct groups of people. Roopkund A had ancestry typical of South Asians. They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. Roopkund C was a lone individual whose genome was typical of Southeast Asia. It was the Roopkund B group, a mixture of men and women unrelated to one another, that confounded everyone. Their genomes did not look Indian or even Asian. 'Of all places in the world, India is one of the places most heavily sampled in terms of human diversity,' [David] Reich told me. 'We have sampled three hundred different groups in India, and there's nothing there even close to Roopkund B.'
"[Éadaoin] Harney and Reich began exploring the ancestry of the Roopkund B group, comparing the genomes with hundreds of present-day populations across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The closest match was with people from the Greek island of Crete. 'It would be a mistake to say these people were specifically from Crete,' Reich said. 'A very careful analysis showed they don't match perfectly. They are clearly a population of the Aegean area.' The Roopkund B group made up more than a third of the samples tested—fourteen individuals out of thirty-eight. Since the bones at the lake were not collected systematically, the finding hinted that the Mediterranean group in total might have been quite large. One-third of three hundred, the lower estimate of the Roopkund dead, is a hundred people.
"As bizarre as the result seemed, it nonetheless matched an analysis of bone collagen that the Max Planck Institute and the Harvard lab had done on the same individuals, to determine their diet. Dietary information is stored in our bones, and plants, depending on how they fix carbon during photosynthesis, create one of two chemical signatures—C3 or C4. A person who eats a diet of C3 plants, such as wheat, barley, and rice, will have isotope ratios of carbon in their bones different from those of a person eating a diet high in millets, which are C4. Sure enough, the analysis of Roopkund bone collagen revealed that, in the last ten or so years of their lives, the Roopkund A people ate a varied C3 and C4 diet, typical for much of India; Roopkund B ate a mostly C3 diet, typical of the Mediterranean.
"During the study, the Reich lab had divided up its bone-powder samples, sending one portion to the carbon-14-dating laboratory at Penn State. (Doing this rather than having the Penn State samples sent straight from Hyderabad was a way of insuring that the labs were working on the same individuals.) When the carbon-dating results came back, there was another surprise: there appeared to have been multiple mass-death events at Roopkund. The Roopkund A individuals probably died in three or possibly four incidents between 700 and 950 A.D. The Roopkund B group—from the Mediterranean—likely perished in a single event a thousand years later. Because carbon-14 dating is difficult to interpret for the period between 1650 and 1950, the deaths could have occurred anytime during that span, but with a slightly higher probability in the eighteenth century. The lone person of Southeast Asian ancestry in Roopkund C died around the same time.
"The eighteenth-century date was so unexpected that Reich and Harney at first thought it might be a typo, or that the samples had been contaminated. Harney wrote up the findings, in a paper co-authored by twenty-seven other scientists. She told me, 'We hoped that after the paper was published someone would come forward with information that would help us determine what might have happened at Roopkund—some historian or a person with knowledge of a group of European travellers who vanished in the Himalayas around that time.'
". . . Perhaps, the Roopkund researchers thought, there might be a tribe or a group in India descended from Greeks. Alexander left behind commanders and soldiers in some of the territories he conquered, many of whom stayed. Members of the Kalash tribe, in northern Pakistan, claim to be descendants of Alexander's soldiers. (This was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's story 'The Man Who Would Be King.') The Kalash are a distinct people with their own language and an ancient, animistic religion. Genetic research suggests that the Kalash have a Western European origin, and one disputed study found Greek heritage. On investigation, Reich's team found that the modern genetic profile of the Kalash did not resemble that of Roopkund B. Two centuries before Christ, parts of northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan formed the Indo-Greek Kingdom, the easternmost state of the Hellenic world. But, again, Roopkund B didn't resemble any populations living there now.
"Could Roopkund B have come from an unsampled population in India descended from Greeks or a related group? In this scenario, an enclave of migrants to India never admixed with South Asians, and retained their genetic heritage. But the genetics of Roopkund B, showing no sign of isolation or inbreeding, ruled this out, too. And then there was the stubborn fact that the Roopkund B people ate a diet more consistent with the Mediterranean than with India. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: they were Mediterranean travellers who somehow got to Roopkund, where they died in a single, terrible event. And yet the historians I consulted, specialists in South Asian and Greek history and authorities in the history of Himalayan mountaineering, said that, in recent centuries, there was no evidence of a large group of unrelated people from the eastern Mediterranean—men and women—travelling in the Himalayas before 1950."
I have no idea!
--Good luck with the bureaucracy. I'm glad today the gears were actually moving.
Thank you. It was peculiar but not unpleasant to feel that representatives of a bureaucracy cared.
no subject
Wow, that is amazing. What we need now is for interested historians to pore over records from the time period. SOMEthing has to show up! It's not like we're talking about prehistory!
no subject
You're welcome!
SOMEthing has to show up! It's not like we're talking about prehistory!
That's what I'm hoping. But especially considering the persistence of the legend about the pilgrims and Nanda Devi, you see why it feels strange that there are no local stories about the foreigners, even just dunno who they were or what they were looking for, but they never came back this way, so we guess they found it?