Fascinating. Thank you for the vid. I knew of the incident, but didn't know what actually happened, nevermind how creepy that interjection was.

I don't know about architectural archeology. To me the most important technology transfer (to use the modern vernacular) was 'movable type' which was invented by the Chinese a long time before Guttenberg. The technology of putting characters together on a press and inking them onto paper, only got to Europe due to Genghis Khan and the Mongolians--who have--similar to latin languages, a fixed number of characters in their writing(i.e. A-Z). The Chinese have close to 30,000 characters in their written language--making movable type not practical for Chinese, but as the Mongolians swept across the Asian Steppe to Europe, creating the largest continuous 'country' in the world's history (from China to the Mediterranean Sea, knowledge in Europe about the Mogols spread to the West. It is not surprising that paper making techniques perfected in China, quickly replaced hand painted/printed text on vellum (thinned out leather) as wood pulp was much more available (and sustainable) than to kill 1 animal for just a few pages of text.

There are archeological sites in Mali (West Africa) that had Persian and even Chinese artifacts were found dating a long ways back showing that trade routes though not as extensive as later silk road and later times, but still existed as humans traveled further back than was thought.

It's too bad Alexandria's library was destroyed in the Roman days as it was THE largest library ever made and had tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls going back hundreds of years and in my opinion, along with the Holocaust is one of the most impactful tragedies in human history.

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Thank you!

Dawkins's meme is considered pseudoscience?

Antibiotics generally are all post-WWII, except sulfa, so what was really changing outcomes from wounds was non-antibiotic antimicrobials. Not splitting hairs here; the difference is significant. Already by the turn of the 19th-20th century, it was known that silver, for example, held profound antibacterial properties. Ehrlich's "Salvarsan", a combination of arsenic with organic compound, was considered a 'magic bullet' against syphilis by the first decade of the 20th century. And it was Henry Drysdale Dakin, working at a field hospital in France during WWI, that would forever change the science of wound care. Working in conjuncdtion with Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon, he found that a dilute sodium bichlorite solution (think Chlorox plus Alka-Seltzer) had dramatic, and I mean dramatic, bacteriocidal power, and by using a dilute form, he was able to avoid the injury of healthy tissue in the area around the wound (that problem had proved insurmountable in earlier efforts in the late 19th century using solutions like full-strength chlorox, which proved toxic to tissues).

Against the protestations of fellow surgeons of the multinational allied forces of the U.S., France, Great Britain and others, Dakin argued roundly against automatic amputation of open fractures (gunshots or explosions that produced bone fracture), and to the amazement of all (likely including Dakin himself!), he proved that one could heal an open fracture without infection, by keeping it soaked in "Dakin's solution." In 2022, Dakin's solution continues to be a mainstay in the most grossly-contaminated wounds (think gangrene and bed-sores) in terms of initiating healing and controlling odors (I think one would vastly prefer treating patients in an environment that smells of a commercial laundry, rather than a meat-packing dumpster).

So yes, credit Henry Dakin with the dramatic improvement in wound care during WWI and right up to today.

Prior to WWI, and dating back to the 'Crusades Era' to which you refer, there was known to be antiseptic (no one knew about the role of bacteria and fungi in infection prior to the 1870's or so), the other solution which demonstrated efficacy over and over again, was vinegar. There is a variant second verse to the old "Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, dating back at least to the late medieval period, that goes "Up Jack got and off did trot, as fast as he could caper, to Old Dame Trot, who patched his knot with vinegar and brown paper." [The "Old Dame Trot" reference is also of signficance in dating this verse, but at the risk of chasing you down yet another rabbit hole, I will simply direct you to google Trota of Salerno and read what you like]. At any rate, by the end of the medieval period, dilute vinegar was noted to have antiseptic properties in wounds, while again not producing dangerous damage to normal tissues in the wound area.

So vinegar became a mainstay in wound therapy throughout the early modern era up into the 19th century. It too still enjoys some cachet in modern wound therapy, but has perhaps been superceded by dilute forms of Dakin's solution.

Finally, the use of honey in wounds, which is almost certainly prehistoric, also continues to this day. has a unique efficacy and cost-efficiency, which makes it useful right up to 2022 in wound healing. Now the honey used is not typically over-the-counter from the condiment section of your local grocery, but rather is a formulation known as "leptosperrmum honey" or commercially as MediHoney (still quite sweet and flavorful, but specific for wound care). It tends to stimulate the normal host inflammatory response in a wound, thus separating out necrotic tissue from normal tissue over the course of several days.

So, credit Henry Dakin for sure with the advances during the 20th century. Further advances now in the past twenty years in wound therapy have resulted in the capability of healing wounds that a generation ago would have been considered unhealable, to being resolved in less than 60 days.

Are you suggesting something like the collective unconscious of Jung or meme of Dawkins?

I suppose geometry and physics are the same everywhere at any given time. That could explain most "coincidences".

This is beautifully done. Keep up the good work.

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Very interesting stuff, thanks for taking the time and effort to bring it all here for us.

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Honestly, what Landa left was pretty rudimentary, and early attempts to use it ended in disaster. It didn't seem to work. It was less ignored and more prematurely dismissed.

I mean, language decipherment is always a study in cognitive biases, and Maya is no exception. If anything, the tendency to ignore Knorosov because of Cold War political issues seems more frustrating in retrospect.

Yah, I get it's all complicated. Actually it was exactly one guy saying hey what about this. By completely ignoring the contemporaneous linguistics recorded by the Spanish priest, academics hamstrung themselves for centuries in understanding a native American culture and essentially they gave up. Kudos to Knorozov for ignoring the conventional wisdom and starting from that base, which had been previously dismissed. And subsequently his work generated interest in working on the language again.

Various Mayan languages are spoken by millions of people today.

As far as reading Mayan, it started the process of figuring it out. It was a first step, not the whole.

There were reasons that made it a lot trickier than that. Among other things, written Maya uses multiple symbols to represent the same sound (think soft c and s in English, but many more variations) and scribes would freely substitute as they wrote. There was also very few texts to work from: most of them are on stones in the middle of jungles, and reproductions and photographs often left out details that were critical. And they thought it was written by people who spoke a form of Yucatec Maya, and it was a form of Ch'olti', which is a different language.

Deciphering Maya was a hell of an achievement. Truly astounding. Ot wasn't just a bunch of people being stupid until one dude was like "hey, what about this?"

Such a good read. I enjoyed this post so much. Thank you.

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This. Almost all we know about the Mayan language came from his book

And ignores the Spanish priest who wrote down the syllables in the first place.

Wow - so a 16th century Spanish priest literally wrote out the Mayan alphabet with drawings of the syllabic glyphs aided by Mayan scribes and translated them Latin alphabetic characters but modern academics decided to ignore that in favor of the idea that the writing was indecipherable. Well it would be if you ignore the 'rosetta stone' book. Russian scholar looks at book and uses it to decipher the writing. Genius!

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And he loved his cat.

Thank you for your post