Category History & Events

Did a frigid apocalypse drive out humans from Europe ?

A big freeze previously unknown to science drove early humans from Europe for 200,000 years, but they adapted and returned!

Scientists at University College London (UCL) and the 185 Center for Climate Physics Pusan National University South Korea have found that around 1.12 million years ago. A colossal cooling event in the North Atlantic triggered shifts in climate. Vegetation and food resources, the big freeze likely caused the extinction of early humans in Europe, they said in a study publish in Science.

Our discovery of an extreme glacial cooling event around 1.1 million years ago challenges the idea of continuous early human Occupation of Europe.

Archaic humans, Homo erectus moved from Africa into central Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago from there on, they spread towards Western Europe, establishing a foothold in the Iberian peninsula around 1.5 million years ago.

Researchers combined data from deep ocean sediment cores from the eastern subtropical Atlantic with supercomputer climate and human habitat model simulations covering the period of the depopulation event. Scientists discovered that around 1.12 million years ago, the climate over the Eastern North Atlantic and the adjacent land suddenly cooled by seven degrees Centigrade. The habitat model determined environmental conditions were unsuitable for early H. erectus “We found that over many areas of southern Europe. Early human species such as H. erectus would not have been able to survive.

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What are the oldest surviving photographs of moon?

In March 1840, English-born American John William Draper clicked what are now the oldest surviving photographs of the moon. Using the daguerreotype process that had just been invented, Draper clicked the photograph that showed lunar features.

The smartphones in our hands these days are so powerful and equipped with great cameras that all we need to do to click a photograph of the moon is to wait for the moon to make its appearance and then take a photograph. It wasn’t always this easy though. In fact, the oldest surviving photographs of the moon are less than 200 years old. The credit for taking those photographs goes to English-born American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer John William Draper.

 Born in England in 1811, Draper went to the U.S. in 1832. After receiving a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to New York University in 1837 and was one of the founders of NYU’s School of Medicine in 1840. He not only taught there for most of his life, but also served as the president of the med school for 23 years.

Learns Daguerre’s process

 His interest in medicine, however, didn’t keep him away from dabbling with chemistry too. The chemistry of light-sensitive materials fascinated Draper and he learned about the daguerreotype process of photography after the news arrived in the U.S. from Europe. French artist and photographer Louis Daguerre had invented the process only in 1839.

Draper attempted to improve the photographic process of Daguerre and succeeded in ways to increase plate sensitivity and reduce exposure times. These advances not only allowed him to produce some of the best portrait photographs of the time, but also let him peer into the skies to try and capture the moon.

He met with failure in his first attempts over the winter of 1839-40. He tried to make daguerreotypes of the moon from his rooftop observatory at NYU, but like Daguerre before him, was unsuccessful. The images produced were either underexposed, or were mere blobs of light in a murky background at best.

Birth of astrophotography

 By springtime in March 1840, however, Draper was successful, thereby becoming the first person ever to produce photographs of an astronomical object. He was confident enough to announce the birth of astrophotography to the New York Lyceum of Natural History, which later became the Academy of Sciences. On March 23, 1840, he informed them that he had created a focussed image of the moon.

The exact date when he first achieved it isn’t very clear. While the photograph on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which cannot be shown here due to rights restrictions) is believed to have been clicked on March 16 based on his laboratory notebook, the one pictured here was by most accounts on the night of March 26, three days after he had announced his success. The fact that many of Draper’s original daguerreotypes were lost in an 1865 fire at NYU, and that daguerreotype photographs themselves don’t have a long shelf life unless well-preserved from the moment they were taken means that the ones remaining become all the more significant.

The moon pictured here shows an extensively degraded plate with a vertically flipped last quarter moon, meaning the lunar south is near the top. This shows that Draper used a device called the heliostat to keep light from the moon focussed for a 20-minute-long exposure on the plate. They are of the same we and same circular image area as that of his first failed attempts.

Conflict thesis

Apart from being a physician and the first astrophotographer, Draper also has other claims to fame. He was the invited opening speaker in the famous 1860 meeting at Chford University where English naturalist Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ was the subject of discussion. He is also well known for his book ‘A History of the Conflict between Religion and Science’ which was published in 1874. This book marks the origin of what is known as the “conflict thesis” about the incompatibility of science and religion.

While we will probably never know on which particular March 1840 night Draper captured the first lunar image, his pioneering achievement set the ball rolling for astronomical photography. The fact that he achieved it with a handmade telescope attached to a wooden box with a plate coated with chemicals on the back makes it all the more remarkable.

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Who was one of the first true historians?

Herodotus, a renowned writer from Ancient Greece during the 5th Century BC, embarked on a monumental project in ‘The Histories’. This literary work aimed to document actual historical events, such as the lives of monarchs, significant battles, and geographical landscapes. It also compiled fascinating stories of giant gold-digging ants, a raging king who commanded the sea to be whipped 300 times, and a dolphin that heroically saved a renowned poet from drowning. Although some of the details in Herodotus’s text may not be entirely accurate, ‘The Histories’ revolutionised the recording of the past and earned Herodotus the title “father of history”, as hailed by the Roman orator and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Getting to the root of the problem

Historical recordings before Herodotus’s seminal work were often mere lists of events without any explanation or attempt to understand the underlying causes, with everything attributed to the will of the gods. However, Herodotus sought a more rational and comprehensive understanding of the past. He pioneered a novel approach by examining events from multiple perspectives to understand the reasons that led to them.

The Histories

Herodotus, a Greek born in the Persian-ruled city of Halicarnassus, grew up during a tumultuous period of wars between the Greeks and Persians. Fascinated by the subject, he embarked on a mission to learn all he could about it. ‘The Histories’ opens with the line “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquires”. His inquiry into the Persian Wars is one of the most significant and well-known aspects of this historical work.

In ‘The Histories’, Herodotus explored the political and cultural differences between the Greeks and Persians and provided valuable insights into the mindset and motivations of both sides. He recorded the internal debates of the Persian courts alongside tales of Egyptian flying snakes. This approach to research was called “autopsy”, meaning seeing for oneself, and it allowed Herodotus to become the first writer to examine the past based on the different types of evidence he collected. He evaluated eyewitness accounts, rumours, and traditions before using his reasoning to draw conclusions about what had occurred.

As his influence and power expanded, Herodotus’s writing and the idea of history spread across the Mediterranean. As the first legitimate historian, Herodotus was not without flaws and faced criticism, both during and after his lifetime, from those who doubted the accuracy of his stories. However, contemporary evidence has shed light on some of his seemingly incredible claims. For example, there is a species of marmot in The Himalayas that spreads gold dust while digging. The ancient Persian word for marmot closely resembled the word for ant, so the historian may have fallen victim to a translation error. All in all, Herodotus fared quite well for someone who was writing in an entirely new style.

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Which are the countries formed after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R? What made Ukraine unique?

We have already seen that fifteen independent countries were formed after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist. They are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Russia is internationally recognised as the successor of the U.S.S.R.

The first to declare independence were Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, during March-May, 1990. Among the countries that sprouted from the Soviet Union, Ukraine is getting the most attention these days because of the Russian invasion. Ukraine officially became an independent state on August 24, 1991, with Leonid Kravchuk as the first president. Ukraine gave up all the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, and declared itself a non-nuclear nation on June 1, 1996.

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Who was Boris Yeltsin?

Boris Yeltsin became the first president in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was also the first freely elected leader in the whole history of Russia going back to a thousand years!

President Yeltsin presented a new constitution in 1993 which was approved by the Russian voters. It gave strong powers to the president, leaving the Russian parliament comparatively weaker. Yeltsin abandoned some of the basic ideas that the Soviet Union had held dear. He allowed private ownership of property and brought in a free market, and did away with price controls. Many of the state assets were privatized. Yeltsin also supported a free press, and agreed to a reduction in nuclear arms.

Yeltsin’s reforms made a section of the people very wealthy, but many were left poor. He also invited criticism against Russia by sending troops to Chechnya in 1994, causing the death of many. Yeltsin announced his resignation on December 31, 1999, and named Vladimir Putin as his successor. He died on April 23, 2007.

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Why is it said that a weakened military also contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R?

No doubt, the Soviet Union was a superpower in the world. Yet, its military was also feeling the impact of perestroika and glasnost.

Funding for the military was reduced considerably between 1985 and 1991, and the troop strength came down. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev acted on the negotiations for a long pending arms reduction treaty, bringing about the first major reduction. This reduced military strength by 500,000 men. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened around this time to which more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers were deployed. The ten- year-long Afghan war left more than 15,000 Soviet troops dead and thousands injured.

People’s resistance to military draft also contributed to the decline of troops. In the new spirit of glasnost, the conscripted soldiers felt free and bold to talk about the abuses they suffered. This caused great concern among the public and there was resistance everywhere to military draft. As separatist movements came up in the republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania between 1989 and 1991, the military was not strong enough to suppress them.

The centralised Communist Party was losing its grip. The Party hard-liners organised a coup attempt to overthrow Gorbachev, fed up with perestroika and glasnost. But the attempt failed, because the now-fragmented military stood in support of Gorbachev. Gorbachev managed to stay in office, but the coup had weakened the U.S.S.R further, quickening its slide to dissolution.

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