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HOST) Commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert has noticed that around the world people are finding things – amazing stuff – but why this spate of wonderful discoveries should be happening now, he doesn’t know.
(GILBERT) First, in July, an amateur English treasurer hunter with one of those metal detectors found the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found: an astonishing 1500 pieces of gold and silver, copper, garnet, and glass.
It’s probably war loot dating back to about the year 700: it contains dozens of pommel caps, says archaeologist Kevin Leahy – decorative medal caps that fit over the knobs of sword handles. The great Old English poem "Beowulf" references triumphant warriors taking as trophies the pommel caps from the weapons of their vanquished enemies. There were also gorgeous decorations, crosses, and more, all dating back about 1300 years. You can see photos on the web.
One of the most interesting pieces is a strip of gold with a warlike quotation in Latin from the Old Testament: "Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face." Experts say that that the find will revolutionize our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman Conquest in 1066, and it’ll cause us to rethink the Dark Ages. Among other things, amidst all the mud and misery of that time, medieval England may have been far wealthier than we thought.
Then, in Ethiopia, scientists unearthed Ardi. Only four feet tall and 110 pounds, she is the earliest human ancestor ever found – 4.4 million years old. Anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy says that Ardi’s skeleton changes the common wisdom about human evolution. That’s because rather than humans evolving from ancient chimp-like creatures, as was previously thought, Ardi provides evidence that chimps and humans both evolved from some even more ancient common ancestor, but each evolved separately. Ardi is not that ancestor, but with her, we’re closer to it than ever before. Harvard University curator of paleoanthropology calls Ardi "one of the most important discovers for the study of human evolution."
Then just recently researchers discovered in China fossils of a new type of flying reptile. What’s particularly important is that it is considered the first clear evidence supporting a controversial idea called modular evolution. That’s where natural selection promotes a whole bunch of changes or traits more or less at once, rather than one at a time. The fossil skeletons they found are of a hawk-like reptile with an evolved head and neck but more primitive other features.
All these discoveries have one thing in common: they all revolutionize how we think about something. They change our understanding of what we thought was settled fact. Such research corrects mistakes – errors – in our understanding and increases our knowledge of the past and the world around us.
In truth, such discoveries are happening all the time, although most of them don’t include gold and silver treasure. Society, however, has an understandable tendency in its thinking to hang on to the status quo.
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Peter Gilbert on line at VPR-dot-net.