As if the present wasn’t messy enough, the past has been changing shape lately.

Admittedly, it does that a lot. The minute you turn your back, some historian or archeologist, rearranges the historical (or prehistoric) furniture. Still, it does seem like they’ve been especially busy lately. Here’s the relocated furniture I’ve stubbed my toe on lately.

 

How long humans have been in charge of fire

Back when I was a kid, humans had been making fire for 50,000 years. Now it’s been 400,000 years. 

No, that does not speak to how old I am. I’m not coy about my age:I’m 103 and have been for decades. It speaks to the discovery of a place in Suffolk where hominids were making fire 350,000 years earlier than anyone told them to.

Whether or not the fire-makers in question were your early ancestors depends where your more recent ancestors came from. The fire-makers were probably early Neanderthals, and the DNA of non-Africans carries something along the lines of 2% Neanderthal inheritance. The DNA of Africans carries something along the lines of 0%.

That’s not a recent rearrangement of the prehistoric furniture. When I was a kid, DNA hadn’t been invented yet, so we had to manage without it and we were free to think Neanderthals were a low-brow and basically irrelevant relative who got out of the way when our own more perfect species came along. You know, an experiment that got abandoned in favor of our glowing and glorious selves.

Now that some of us turn out to be the descendants of that failed experiment–well, first there was an awkward moment or two, then somehow their pictures changed so that Neanderthals now look smarter than they used to. It’s nothing short of miraculous how much a person’s looks can change after they’ve not only died but gone extinct.

But we were talking about fire: the theory has been and still is that humans first used fire by taking advantage of ones that happened naturally–a lightning strike, say, or a Game of Thrones dragon swooping over. People would have learned how to keep it going, but they were nomadic, and fire’s hard to carry. When they had to choose between moving to a new place where food was to be found or staying behind with the fire, where they could cook, they would’ve had to choose the food. So would we.

The find at Suffolk doesn’t destroy that theory, but it does show that the humans there–or hominids, if you want to be starchy about it–were using flint and iron pyrite to strike a spark and start a fire. Over and over again. In the same place. Some 350,000 years before they were expected at the party. 

 

Newly discovered relatives

Back in the 1990s, an Australopithecus skeleton was found in a cave in South Africa, and ever since the experts have been arguing about what kind of Australopithecus it is, prometheus or africanus. Recently, though, someone’s suggested that it’s neither, but an entirely new type of Australopithecus.

“This thing will be part of a lineage of hominins,”according to Jesse Martin, of the University of the Witwatersrand, “so it’s possible that we have not just a point in our human family tree that we hadn’t discovered before, but an entire limb of that tree.” 

The skeleton is somewhere between 2.8 and 3.67 million years old, but Australopithicus as a species goes back 4.2 million years. 

Until someone comes along to move everything around again, that’s still before anyone got control of fire.

 

The mighty Roman soldiers 

Fire, as you may have guessed, didn’t solve all of humanity’s problems. Judging by what’s been found in the sewage drains at Vindolanda, a Roman fort along Hadrian’s Wall, Roman soldiers were hosting a parasite party up on the Roman Empire’s northern border and the guests were roundworms, whipworms, and Giardia duodenalis. Those three could easily have brought salmonella and shigella with them, but they didn’t sign the guest book so we can’t know for sure.

Don’t you wish you’d been there?

All three are spread by fecal-oral transmission–in other words, letting the upper half of your body get too well acquainted with the lower half. The ways the two halves become acquainted involve water, food, and hands, and once the bugs were in place they could’ve caused diarrhea and malnutrition.

According to Dr. Marissa Ledger, who led the Cambridge component of the study, “While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen. These chronic infections likely weakened soldiers, reducing fitness for duty.” 

To be fair to Vindolanda, the find is a good match for what’s been found in other Roman forts, although the parties at other forts had a longer guest list. Whatever else it teaches us, it means Rome’s famous plumbing didn’t protect them from contaminated water.

 

Medieval warfare

Enough pre- and early history. The middle ages have been moving around too. The medieval British army has had the reputation of being basically a bunch of amateurs, scraped up from the fields and sent off to do battle with whoever the king had lost his temper with lately, which was generally the French. (That last sentence may contain a certain element of exaggeration, an absence of fact checking, and both nuts and dairy products. If you have allergies–sorry, I really need to put these warnings at the beginning. I’ll try to do better.) 

With that out of the way, though, let’s do the serious stuff: a group of historians have created the Medieval Soldier Database, a record of all the soldiers paid by the English crown from the 1350s to 1453. The original idea was to “challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like.”

A lot of the information came from muster rolls–lists of every war-related person the crown was paying. The crown wanted to know what its money was buying and that everyone showed up when and where they were expected. For many of the people on them, the muster rolls are the only surviving record of their passage through life. 

By following individual soldiers, the database’s creators have been able to trace some careers for 20 years and more. Soldiers can also be seen moving up in rank. All of that argues for the presence of at least some professionals. Other people show up as both soldiers and participants in the Peasants Revolt, confirming longstanding assumptions that some of the revolt’s participants had military experience.

For example: Thomas Crowe of Snodland, in Kent, may have fought in France in 1369 and had knowledge of trebuchets. During the Peasants Revolt (1381; you’re welcome) he was accused of “taking up position and throwing great stones” to demolish someone’s house. 

Guess where he (probably) learned that.

He shows up back in the military in 1385 and 1387. I’d love to fill in the intriguing gaps there but that’s the annoying thing about history: you’re limited to the facts. 

The leader of the Peasants Revolt was Wat Tyler, and not much is known about him, but historians have assumed he had military experience, and intriguingly the database lists a Walter Tyler, who was (yes) a tiler. Was it the same guy? Hard to say but harder to think it wasn’t.

The rolls also give a sense of what it took to keep an army working. It includes payments to masons, locksmiths, fletchers (they made arrows), bowyers (they made bows), plumbers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers (they made barrels), ditch diggers (they made ditches), boatmen, carters, and carters’ boys (they made mischief)–not all of them in multiples but it makes a neater list if we don’t keep shifting from plural to singular and back.

 

A volcanic eruption & the black death

This isn’t a change in the way history’s pieces have been put in place but an expansion–a puzzle piece that fits where there used to be a gap. We were taught–those of us who studied European history and managed to stay awake–that the black death was spread by fleas carried by rats carried, initially, by ships carrying the ordinary goods that Europe traded with those exotic countries to the east.

So far, so good, but there seems to be more to the story. We can now add a volcano in 1345, and following from that a massive dust cloud and a famine. All that follows from the tree rings some clever devil found.

According to this theory, a volcano spewed out ash and gases, which blocked sunlight and caused the temperatures around the Mediterranean to drop for several years and the harvests to be poor. So the Italian city states did the sensible thing: to head off a famine, they bought grain from around the Black Sea, and that’s when the rats and the fleas made their entrance. And with that grain came the rats, the fleas, and the plague.

Some days, you just can’t do anything right. But if we tell the story that way, it does bring us back to the place we expected to land: plague sweeps through Europe, killing something like a third to a half of the population. 

Isn’t history uplifting and fun?

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You might’ve noticed that the volcano should, chronologically speaking, come before the Peasants Revolt. What can I tell you? Numbers don’t have much to say to me and by the time I noticed the earlier event had given me an ending I didn’t want to throw away.