For more details see here. The estimate is “only” €100,000, which seems to me a bit on the low side. A similar volume was listed by Christie’s in 2016 as $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 but in the end sold for $3.7 million. This one has had some repairs and is slightly browned with age, but has an interesting provenance. I’d be surprised if it didn’t fetch at least a million. We’ll find out in a week!
Exactly one hundred years ago today, on 12th November 1925, five musicians gathered in the Okeh studios in Chicago to create musical history. The band was Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and they were about to embark on a series of recording sessions that would result in a rich treasury of 20th century music in the form of 33 sides recorded between November 1925 and December 1927.
The band (pictured above) consisted of Louis Armstrong (on cornet on this track, although he switched to trumpet by the time of the later sessions). Kid Ory played trombone Johnny Dodds Clarinet. Lil Hardin (who was married to Louis Armstrong at the time and credited as Lil Armstrong) played piano and Johnny St Cyr played banjo or guitar. For many people, the collective imagination and sheer drive of Armstrong, Dodds and Ory made them just about the perfect front line. The way they take this one out at the end is a great example.
I won’t even try to write a detailed analysis of this historic record. I’ll just make a couple of points about the Hot Fives.
First, this band never played together as such in live concerts; they were strictly a studio band. In fact, they always sounded like a bunch of friends getting together to have fun making music, which is no doubt because that’s what they were. Most of the records they made were done in a single take, too.
Second, the line-up was unusual because it didn’t have a full rhythm section. At least part of the reason for this was that, at the time, drums were very difficult to record. In Louis Armstrong’s recorded reminiscences he talks about the fact that drums would often make the needle jump when cutting a record if they were were positioned close to the recording equipment. On the other hand if they were too far away to avoid that happening then they often couldn’t be heard at all. The low-frequency response of old fashioned recording systems made bass lines largely inaudible too. Anyway, it was decided that the excellent combination of Lil Hardin’s piano and Johnny St Cyr’s banjo would provide a sufficient framwork. So they were, though later on, in May 1927, a brass bass and drums were added to create the Hot Seven who made a further 11 sides, including the all-time classic Potato Head Blues.
Finally I’ll just remark that according to Satchmo’s memoirs, this track Gut Bucket Blues was the first to be recorded. It does sound like it too, as he introduces the members of the band. I wonder if they knew at this first session what a sensation these records were going to create?
P.S. I know it’s a bit scratchy, but it’s 100 years old. It’s amazing to me that you can hear anything at all.
So James Watson, a deeply unsavoury individual who co-won a Nobel Prize by stealing Rosalind Franklin’s ground breaking research on DNA, and was an unrepentant racist and misogynist, is dead. Lest it be forgotten, here is a collection of authentic quotes that give an insight into his true character.
I notice this morning a short item about a museum in Athy about explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was born in Kilkea which is near Athy. There was a museum there before, but it has been much expanded and renovated. I must make an expedition there one day to see it, as Athy is in County Kildare only about 60km to the south of Maynooth.
Seeing this article reminded me that some months ago I watched a documentary series called Shackleton: Death or Glory. It’s not a new series, but I hadn’t seen it before, and found it gripping and inspiring. You can see the entire series (3 episodes) on Youtube here. The idea was to reproduce the situation that Shackleton and his crew faced in 1916 when they had to abandon their expedition to cross Antarctica when their ship, Endurance, was trapped in the ice. The courage and leadership he showed in saving all their lives is awe-inspiring.
To cut a long and amazing story short, in 1914 Shackleton led an expedition to cross Antarctica on foot for the first time. But disaster struck before even reaching the continent. His ship Endurance was trapped in sea ice and he and his 27 men were marooned. Realising that the ship would be crushed, he ordered the crew to take everything they could, including the (three) lifeboats. They made a camp on the ice and stayed there several months, but it was clear they could not remain there indefinitely, so they set off with their provisions in the lifeboats towards Elephant Island, a perilous journey of almost 300 km, through freezing water thick with blocks of ice.
Elephant Island was safer that the ice shelf from which they had escaped but it was nowhere near any trade route so chance of being rescued by a passing ship was zero. The outlook was grim. A slow death from starvation and exposure seemed inevitable.
Shackleton could see only one (remote) possibility of rescue, which was to take one of the boats and try to find help. That meant travelling across the open sea to South Georgia, a journey of some 1500 km. Not just any sea, mind you: the notoriously stormy and treacherous South Atlantice. It was a very tall order but in his diary he calmy recorded his thought process, which was basically that if they all stayed put they would certainly die and if the rescue party perished those left behind would be no worse off. He had to take the chance.
Shackelton picked five men and set off in one of the lifeboats – a 22ft wooden vessel – across the merciless ocean, in an apparently desperate attempt to reach the only possible help at the Stromness Whaling station in South Georgia. The rest of the crew – 22 men – were left on Elephant Island.
Almost unbelievably, Shackleton and his five men survived 16 days at sea and made the crossing. But his gruelling mission didn’t end there, because they arrived on the wrong side of the island of South Georgia. The boat and two of the crew were in poor shape by then so they could not continue by sea. Shackleton, taking two men with him, had to traverse about 40km of an unchartered mountain range, without any mountaineering equipment in order to reach the safety of Stromness. Shackleton successfully raised the alarm, but the story was still far from over. The first thing Shackleton had to do was collect the two men he had left on the other side of South Georgia. All six were safe.
Now he had to think about the other 22 still at Elephant Island. In search of more appropriate ships, Shackleton went first to the Falkland Islands and then to Chile. Several rescue attempts failed, because of the pack ice and, once because of a fire onboard. Eventually he persuaded the Chilean Navy to lend him a steam tug, the Yelcho, which made it to Elephant Island. The men there were in poor shape, hungry and demoralised, almost but they were all alive. Against all the odds, Shackleton, saved every single one of his men from what must have seemed like certain death.
Aside from his physical courage and endurance, two characteristics exemplify the quality of Ernest Shackleton’s leadership: one is that he would never ask any of his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, and the other is that he put the wellbeing of his men at the centre of all his decisions. Can you say those things about your “Leader”?
These days we hear a lot of talk, in various contexts, about leadership but most of the people who claim to show leadership don’t know the meaning of the word. Next time you hear some useless twit claiming to be a leader, think about Ernest Shackleton and judge them by his standards.
While writing yesterday’s post about the evolution of languages, and the importance of genetic information in reconstructing the story thereof, I was reminded of a post I wrote a while ago about the peculiarities of my own genome, a listing of which I have on a CD-ROM at home. There’s not as much data involved as you might think: it’s effectively only about 800 MB.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turns out that I have the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation. Not only that, I have it twice over, in that I have two copies (homozygotes). I must therefore have inherited it from both parents. This mutation confers virtually complete immunity from HIV-1 infection.
The above graphic shows that more than 10% of the population in Northern Europe has this mutation in just one allele (i.e. they are heterozygotic). To get an estimate of how many have the form on two alleles (i.e. homozygotic) form you can just square that number, so around 1% or more.
It is thought that the CCR5-Δ32 mutation occurred in a single individual in Scandinavia around 1,000 years ago. When I wrote that post I tacitly assumed that it had propagated passively, i.e. without any particular selection, to the modern era. That it reached 10% of the population starting from just one individual surprised me, but I let it pass.
More recently, I came across a paper about how advances in genetics have impacted epidemiological studies. In the abstract it shows that my assumption was probably incorrect.
Algorithms of molecular evolutionary theory suggested that the CCR5-Δ32 mutation occurred but once in the last millennium and rose by strong selective pressure relatively recently to a ~10% allele frequency in Europeans.
It goes on to say this:
Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that CCR5-Δ32 was selected due to its protective influence to resist Yersinia pestis, the agent of the Black Death/bubonic plague of the 14th century.
I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post that evidence of the plague bacillus is found in a significant number of prehistoric human remains and this almost certainly played a role in the ebb and flow of populations. In the context of CCR5-∆32, however it seems that it may have been advantageous to carry it long before the arrival of HIV/AIDS. That might account for it reaching the relatively high level that it did.
Among the downsides, however, as the article explains, are an increased risk for encephalomyelitis and death when infected with the West Nile virus. Hopefully further cohort studies of people with this mutation will help elucidate its effect on other diseases.
By the way, in contrast to most people I know, I have still never had Covid-19…
I interrupted the sequence of novels I’ve been reading recently to absorb a non-fiction book, Proto by Laura Spinney (left). I find linguistics a fascinating subject and when I saw a review of this recently and couldn’t resist. I’m glad I bought it because it’s absolutely fascinating. It is the story – or at least a very plausible account of the story of the lost ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the methods that have been used to reconstruct “Proto”, and why it was the spark that generated so many other languages across Europe, Eurasia and India.
The topic is very complex and I won’t attempt to describe it all in depth here; each chapter could be a book in itself because each family of languages within the Indo-European group – including lost ones such as Tocharian – has its own fascinating story. There are chapters focussing on the origins of language itself, the possibilities surround Proto (a language that was never written and probably exists in many dialects), Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic and Italic, the Indo-Iranian group (based on Sanskrit), Baltic and Slavic, and Albanian, Armenian and Greek. The last of these is fascinating because it used a method of writing borrowed from a non-Indo-European source that became the origin of the European alphabet.
The story of which all these are subplots begins around the Black Sea shortly after end of the last Ice Age. In this area there lived mesolithic hunter-gatherers who had survived the ice who interacted with farmers moving up from the direction of modern day Syria. Their languages would have merged in some way to allow them to describe things that their neighbours had that they didn’t. Hunter-gatherers would not have words for, e.g., ploughing or barley while farmers would have fewer words for spears and other hunting equipment. Into this mix, the argument goes, came a third group, a fully nomadic culture called the Yamnaya people. These people and their successors subsequently underwent vast migrations from the steppes across the continent and were responsible for spreading the Proto-Indo-European languages. That’s a hypothesis, not a proven fact, but it is plausible and has a reasonable amount of evidence in its favour.
Recent progress in this field has been driven not only by linguists but also by archaeologists and geneticists, with each aspect of this triangulation vital. It was reading about archaeology in this book that prompted me to write a post about the Nebra Sky Disc. There are some fascinating snippets from palaeogenetics, too. Full DNA sequences are now known for about 10,000 individuals who lived in prehistoric times.
One extraordinary find involves two burials of individuals who both lived about 5,000 years ago. Their DNA profiles match so well that they were probably second cousins or first cousins once removed. The thing is that one of them was buried in the Don Valley, north-east of Rostov in modern-day Russian, while the other was found 3,000 km away in the Altai mountains. Assuming they were both buried where they died, the implications for the distance over which people could move in a lifetime are remarkable.
Another fascinating genetic snippet applies to Irish, a Celtic language. The Celtic languages derive from a proto-Celtic source that probably arose about 1000 BC. Around 2450 BC one of the cultures preceding the Celts arrived in Britain and Ireland, now called the Bell Beaker People because of their taste in pottery. The genetic record shows that the DNA of the Beaker folk replaced about 90% of the previous local gene pool, and all of the Y chromosomes; for some reason men of the earlier culture stopped fathering children. A similar change happened in Ireland, about 200 years later.One possible inference is that there was a violent conquest involving the erasure of the male population, but we don’t know for sure that it was sudden and catastrophic.
Whatever language the Beaker people brought with them was not Celtic (though it may have been Indo-European). The fascinating conundrum is that when Celtic languages arrived in Ireland whoever brought them left not a trace in the genetic record. This is unlike any of the similar changes in language use throughout European pre-history. Either the population responsible has not been identified or the language was spread through communication (e.g. for trade) rather than settlement. Irish may be a Celtic language, but there is little evidence of significant numbers of Celts settling here and bringing it with them.
Some time ago I wrote a post about the Celtic languages, which you might want to look at if you’re interested in this topic. A lot of that post I now realize to be very simplistic, but to add one other snippet I should mention that the name of Turkish football team Galatasaray translates to “Palace of the Celts” after the Celtic-speaking people who settled in Anatolia; these were the Galatians to whom Paul addressed his Epistle.
I thoroughly recommend this fascinating book. It made me want to find out more about so many things. It also gacve me additional motivation to pursue an idea I had a while ago to do a Masters in Linguistics wehn I retire from physics…
This remarkable object is made of bronze, is around 30 cm diameter and weighs about 2.2 kg. It has a blue-green patina and is inlaid with gold symbols, usually interpreted as the full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars, including a cluster of seven stars, thought to represent the Pleiades. The gold arc on the right probably represents the Sun’s path between the solstices; the angle subtended by the arc (82°) is the correct angle sunrise at the summer and winter solstices and at the latitude of the discovery site (Mittelberg, near Nebra, in Germany); there was probably another such arc on the other side of the disk (now lost). Remarkably, the tin used in making the bronze from which it is formed has been traced by metallurgical analysis to Cornwall.
The Nebra disc has been dated to c. 1800–1600 BCE (Bronze Age) which makes it the oldest (certain) depiction of celestial phenomena known from anywhere in the world. In November 2021, a replica of the Nebra Sky Disc was taken by German astronaut Matthias Maurer to the International Space Station.
Tidying a few things up ahead of the start of term I discovered this old clipping, yellowed with age, and decided to scan it before it disintegrates entirely:
It is from the (then) Manchester Guardian which is now known as the Grauniad. The article is dated 1st October 1921, which implies that the talk must have been on the afternoon of Friday 30th September 1921. However, the University of Manchester website states that the talk was on June 9th 1921. During his visit, Einstein was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Manchester, which is recorded here as having been presented on June 8th, so it appears the Guardian piece was published some time after the event. As usual, Einstein gave his lecture – to a packed house – entirely in German, as he did when he lectured in Nottingham almost a decade later.
Einstein was already famous by 1921 – largely thanks to the 1919 Eclipse results (see, e.g., here) – but it was still before he won his Nobel Prize (in 1922).
Anyway, the text down the right-hand side of the Guardian piece can be found here; it’s well worth reading!
On September 4th, when I posted a piece about the forthcoming Presidential Election in Ireland, I forgot to mention that just two days earlier was the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Éamon de Valera, founder of Fianna Fáil (one of the two largest political parties in Ireland) and architect of the Irish constitution, who died on 29th August 1975 at the age of 92. Here’s some coverage at the time by (British) Movietone News, the commentary is rather generous to him:
De Valera (nickname `Dev’) is an enigmatic figure, who was a Commandant in the Irish Republican Army during the 1916 Easter Rising, but despite being captured he somehow evaded execution by the British. There’s no evidence, incidentally, that he escaped the firing squad because he was born in America. Dev subsequently became Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and then President (Head of State) of the Irish Republic.
Eamon de Valera, photographed sometime during the 1920s.
There’s no question in my mind that de Valera is the most significant Irish politician of the 20th Century, which is not to say I fid him an agreeable figure at all and his legacy isn’t particularly positive. Nevertheless, his funeral was perhaps as significant event for the Irish as that of Winston Churchill had been for the British just a decade earlier.
Over the past couple of weeks RTÉ television broadcast a two-part documentary called Dev: Rise and Rule; the second part was on last night. It is quite nicely made, but disappointingly superficial and lacking in any real historical insight. The suggestion that it would “decode” Dev was unfulfilled. This is a pity because RTÉ often does good documentaries.
Anyway, this gives me an excuse to mention again, Dev’s connection with Maynooth. De Valera was a mathematics graduate, and for a short time (1912-13) he was Head of the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which was then a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. The Department became incorporated in Maynooth University when it was created in 1997. Mathematical Physics is no longer a part of the Mathematics Department at Maynooth, having first become a Department in its own right, then changing its name to the Department of Theoretical Physics and then, just last year, being subsumed within a new Department of Physics.
De Valera missed out on a Professorship in Mathematical Physics at University College Cork in 1913. He joined the the Irish Volunteers, when it was established the same year. And the rest is history. I wonder how differently things would have turned out had he got the job in Cork?
Quinto expeditionum anno nave prima transgressus1 ignotas ad id tempus gentis crebris simul ac prosperis proeliis domuit; eamque partem2 Britanniae quae Hiberniam aspicit copiis instruxit...
The first question relates to transgessus meaning “crossed”. Where did he cross? I remembered all the way back to school days reading some of this, and found the following in Vol. 1 of the Latin textbook we used back then (Wilding’s Latin Course for Schools). On page 68 of that tome we find the following as part of an exercise to translate from Latin to English:
Agricola copias Clanoventae, ubi ora Britanniae ad Hiberniam spectat...
Clanoventae is a Roman name for the town of Ravenglass, near the Cumbrian coast. At the time I took this to be a direct quote from Tacitus, but it isn’t. Obviously Wilding made that bit up! There is evidence of substantial Roman activity at Ravenglass, but none that this was the place he placed the troops intended for a possible invasion of Ireland. Moreover, the actual quote from Tacitus makes it clear that he “crossed” with ships, but that doesn’t seem right when you look at the location (marked with the red thingy):
It’s quite a long way to “cross” from there to modern-day Scotland, and in any case what you would see from there is first and foremost the Isle of Man. From there he could definitely see both Britain and Ireland, but as far as I know there’s little or non direct evidence of Roman activity there, though the Romans did know it through trading interactions. They called it Insula Manavia. Tacitus does not use place names very often – there are only half-a-dozen – in the entire book about Agricola but it seems to me he would not have confused it with Hibernia.
Putting my school textbook away and turning to other commentaries, I didn’t find any real consensus but the best bet is that what Agricola crossed was the Solway Firth, and where he crossed from could well have been Maryport, also a well-known Roman military site (called Alauna). There is no direct evidence for that either, though, and the earliest directly dated evidence of significant activity there is much later, around 122AD. Agricola’s incursion to Scotland was around 81 AD.
If Agricola did cross the Solway Firth he and his army would have landed in what is now Dumfries and Galloway. Most commentaries now believe that the place from which he could see Ireland would be the Rhinns of Galloway, the hammer-shaped peninsula to the West of Stranraer. Now that isn’t the part of Scotland closest to Ireland – that would be the Mull of Kintyre, much further North – but it is pretty close, and it certainly does face across the Irish Sea with nothing in the way.
There is also plenty of evidence of Roman activity near Stranraer, including a settlement and fort in a place known to them as Rerigonium. There are also traces of a Roman road. That is important because, to the Romans, roads were primarily military structures, meant to facilitate the movement of troops and supplies quickly. Had the Romans ever invaded Ireland they would have built an extensive network of roads, as they did in England.
It seems to me that Rerigonium would have been a good choice of place to launch the putative invasion. Loch Ryan would have provided a natural harbour for the ships that would take troops the short distance to Ireland and it’s not difficult to imagine a Roman legion embarking there.
P.S. When I was a lad there were regular ferries from Stranraer to Belfast and back, but now they operate to and from Cairnryan, about 6 miles further up Loch Ryan.
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In the Dark 