timesacircle

[timesacircle]

glad to see that not only was "live, laugh, love" was a concept in ancient rome but they were also displaying the sentiment in forums for all to see

[timesacircle]

Stone cooking supports used to grill skewers of meat by Minoans on Santorini, circa 3600 years old. The line of holes in the base supplied coals with oxygen. Many consider modern "souvlaki" street kebabs a direct descendant of this portable food system. Museum of Prehistoric Thera, Greece. More: https://thetravelbible.com/museum-of-artifacts/

[timesacircle]

Some fanart of this ancient figurine! Also got commissioned to draw her hanging out with a friend!

#ohh this is cool

[timesacircle]

i wish i could talk to the artists of cave paintings. do you know! do you know that your art lasted thousands of years! do you know that it's still beautiful! do you know that you've left us a view of creatures and cultures that have been gone since before our history starts! do you know how many people look at what you've made and think, "this is what it is to be human"! do you know i'm still in awe of your skill and elegance and stylization even now in a world that would probably be unrecognizable to you! aaaaa

[timesacircle]

[timesacircle]

I can’t tell you how much I love this artwork from ancient Egypt (the Middle Kingdom). People have been raising cattle and practicing animal husbandry for so long, that there is something almost inherently human about this scene.

Everyone in the field of veterinary medicine or agriculture knows the feeling of staying up late with a laboring animal trying to make sure both mom and baby are okay. Delivering a calf is often physically and emotionally exhausting work that takes enormous patience and learned skill. It requires a unique balance of physical strength and gentleness to do correctly. There is no feeling quite like getting that baby out and everyone is okay. I’m certain ancient people must have felt the same way, and I wonder if the artist knew this feeling firsthand. I wonder if those humans depicted were people the artist knew, if the cow and calf maybe were as well.

[timesacircle]

i love very very early sculpture pieces because they evoke such visceral truth about human nature in a way that modern art is just incapable of replicating

[timesacircle]

Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) Hand Prints pictograph Photographer: Susan Silberberg-Peirce San Juan River, near Bluff, Utah, United States

[timesacircle]

i love you ancient girls and women making things

[timesacircle]

~ Crab Vessel with Double Spout.

Place of origin: Colombia, Calima Region

Period: Ilama Period

Date: 1500 B.C.-A.D. 100

Medium: Ceramics

[timesacircle]

Dancing Muskoxen by Pitseolak Qimirpik (Inuit)

[timesacircle]

[timesacircle]

St. Edmund, decapitated, cries ("hic, hic, hic") in the margins of a 12th century Bible

MS 002III (The Bury Bible), f. 322r

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, via red_loeb

[timesacircle]

3000 year old petroglyph of a man running away from a big snake. With erection. It is one of the many Rock carvings in Tanum, Sweden and was painted red so its easier for tourists to see.

Click for more artifacts

[timesacircle]

dancing female tomb figures, 618-906 c.e., tang dynasty, eartenware and pigment

[timesacircle]

Textile fragment, 500s-800s, Byzantine Empire, Syria.

[timesacircle]

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Article | Paywall free

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”

Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated [aka losing all their needles], mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.

Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.

Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.

Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.

Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.

It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”

... “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”

-via Science, December 1, 2023

#:)