[HN Gopher] Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed i...
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Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece
Author : diodorus
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-10-08 20:56 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livescience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livescience.com)
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I highly recommend John Romer's Byzantium: The Lost Empire. It's
| available on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| The site kept scrolling up / refocusing to the video playing
| above as I was trying to read the article. Never mind then...
| dimator wrote:
| This was probably done without any kind of pain killing anything,
| besides (just guessing) alcohol. It must have been absolutely
| excruciating for weeks, before the jaw healed. Unbelievable.
| elihu wrote:
| Googling "Byzantine era anesthetics" brings up a whole long
| list of research papers and articles.
|
| Apparently (from the summary of one of the articles) opium has
| been used as a pain killer for a very long time, and the
| Byzantines used laudanum.
|
| https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html
|
| Maybe they knocked the guy out with laudanum before the
| procedure, which would have made the whole thing much easier
| and far less unpleasant for the patient.
| tyingq wrote:
| Looks similar to the jaw break Stefan Struve (MMA fighter) got
| from Mark Hunt.
|
| https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_cro...
| zetalyrae wrote:
| 2017 paper:
| https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/do...
|
| New paper:
| http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Let's not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors.
| Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had
| brains identical to yours and mine.
|
| And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things,
| it's apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and
| reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about
| gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we
| know and how we think today were out there, and we had the
| brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of
| the 200,000 years of humanity's existence.
|
| So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I'm simplifying a very great
| deal.)
| ardit33 wrote:
| Wut... This guy is from the 14th century, which is a relatively
| modern era, where gun powder was starting to being used. This
| is just a century before the start of the renaissance, and we
| are not talking about thousands of years ago.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Anatomically modern vocal chords only developed sometime
| between ~80000 to ~40000 BCE. So although that's still quite a
| lot of time, it's less than what is implied with cranial
| structure.
|
| It's actually surprising how late and relatively sudden vocal
| chords developed compared to the rest of the body, as what
| 'humans' had prior was totally incapable of modern speech. It's
| an unresolved mystery I believe.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people
| had brains identical to yours and mine.
|
| Humans had larger brains in hunter & gatherer times. Similar to
| domesticated animals, it got smaller once we settled down and
| started agriculture.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I don't think the correlation between brain size and general
| intelligence is that strong. Maybe the hunter gatherer used a
| bigger part of his brain to quickly and accurately interpret
| impressions, to find the food and not become food himself.
| The domestic man might have been better at tasks like
| figuring out how much of his seeds he could eat and how much
| he must save to plant next spring, even with a slightly
| smaller brain.
| [deleted]
| david927 wrote:
| > Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until
| Newton.
|
| It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and
| Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly
| others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model
| was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically
| proved it. That's pretty fast, really.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > That's pretty fast, really.
|
| Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast
| if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors
| had the brains to figure it out.
| david927 wrote:
| You know that Newton didn't "discover gravity," right? He
| discovered how it explained planetary motion.
|
| And it's not fair to start the clock before we got the
| heliocentric theory (although Aristarchus of Samos gets an
| honorable mention).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| As I said, I'm simplifying a great deal. I imagine people
| before Newton noticed that if you don't hold things up,
| they fall.
| david927 wrote:
| > _Our ancestors 200,000 years ago when our first
| ancestors had the brains to figure it out._
|
| Newton had to invent calculus to make the proof.
|
| You're not simplifying anything; you just got confused.
| And that's ok, honestly. There is literally not a person
| on this planet, now or ever, who didn't have holes in
| their knowledge or had something confused. It happens.
| [deleted]
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I often wonder how close the ancients were to all the
| knowledge we take for granted.
|
| So much lost forever in all those burned libraries.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Article mentions this--he clearly must have been a person of
| importance to get this kind of treatment. Reading this kind of
| story makes me immensely grateful to be a nobody alive at this
| time and place. Hopefully future generations will similarly look
| back at us with pity for the relative barbarism and deprivation
| we endure.
| rpmisms wrote:
| That's amazing. Gold is a non-bio-reactive metal, and apparently
| they figured that out too.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| They would have observed that gold doesn't rust, for example,
| and it was known for its enduring purity.
| senortumnus wrote:
| Agreed - very sophisticated treatment.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| They knew that wearing silver or copper rings corrode, and gold
| didn't.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are a quite a few assumptions in the article regarding
| this being gold thread, you can of course pile on even more
| assumptions assuming those first ones are true but it becomes
| quite a house of cards like that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "The wire is long gone, but Agelarakis suspects it was gold.
| There was no evidence of a silver alloy, which would have left
| grayish discoloration, nor were there traces of a patina or
| greenish cupric acid stains that would have been left by copper
| or bronze wires, he found.
|
| "It must have been some kind of gold thread, a gold wire or
| something like that, as is recommended in the Hippocratic corpus
| that was compiled in the fifth century B.C.," Agelarakis said.
| Gold is soft and pliable but strong and nontoxic, he added,
| making it a good choice for this type of medical treatment."
|
| That's pretty thin evidence, it may just as easily have been
| sheepguts (used for violin strings, for instance, in spite of
| being called catgut!).
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Wouldn't using dead flesh increase the risk of infection?
|
| In the article, it's also mentioned that Hippocrates
| recommended using gold, and many of his teachings were still
| followed in Byzantine times.
|
| So what's your next theory? Gold sounds fairly plausible to me.
| tablespoon wrote:
| I was kind of skeptical too, but then I found this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History:
|
| > Gut strings were being used as medical sutures as early as
| the 3rd century AD as Galen, a prominent Greek physician from
| the Roman Empire, is known to have used them.[4]
| gnramires wrote:
| > Catgut suture is a type of surgical suture that is
| naturally degraded by the body's own proteolytic enzymes
|
| It couldn't be an organic suture, unless it was supposed to
| last very little (on wiki it says 90 days). Also only
| something study like a metal could hold a bone in place
| reliably, I imagine.
| gumby wrote:
| More likely gut, which was still used well into my lifetime.
|
| As for a metal, silver would have been a better choice than
| gold for both mechanical and anti-infective reasons.
| [deleted]
| nielsbot wrote:
| Article says they didn't use silver based on the evidence (no
| discoloration)
| gumby wrote:
| I saw that. If there is no residue gold is a good
| candidate. I merely meant that silver would have been
| better than gold.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Romans perfected plastic surgery because of gladiators. (Owners
| take care of their slaves, which are valuable.) They even used
| obsidian blades, which reduces scarring. That skill was lost
| for almost 2,000 years.
|
| So it's not a big leap that medical staff at that time were
| experimenting with sutures.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 'That skill was lost for almost 2,000 years.'
|
| Only in the territories of the former Roman empire. Usage of
| obsidian blades has been recorded elsewhere in the world in
| the intervening time.
| jrsdav wrote:
| This is really fascinating. Seeing the grave of human remains is
| one thing, but standing out in the photos is this fragment of
| pottery (likely a jug or a pitcher), where you can see the
| throwing rings of the person who crafted it, along with marks
| where they smoothed out the handle it was after attached.
|
| I feel pretty desensitized to skeletal remains (especially
| apropos in the month of October, Halloween and all), but for some
| reason seeing that vessel with its clear characteristics of being
| wrought with hands like mine, really brings home the humanity of
| this situation. It has me imagining hundreds of possible stories
| explaining what happened here and how these people might have
| lived.
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(page generated 2021-10-08 23:00 UTC)