From My Fantasy Writing Desk
I’ve joined up with Anna Castle, one of my favorite historical mystery writers, and others to offer you free stories, books, and samples. Get to know intriguing new authors–and read for free! Click here to see all the book covers to choose from.
Archaeology I Enjoyed
Doggy Genes
The story behind man’s best friend has gained some more depth and data. Now, genetic research reveals more about where and when dogs and humans began their journey together.
Did doggy domestication happen in one place and spread or in multiple locations simultaneously? As people migrated did they take their dogs with them or find new friends in the new locations?
However, the one constant in all the information this canine genome reveals is that dogs are extremely good at winning human hearts and making themselves useful. Click here for an intriguing article in Science Magazine, “How dogs tracked their humans across the ancient world.”
Haunted by War
Photo, Creative commons use © The Trustees of the British Museum
Researchers studying ancient texts from Mesopotamia dating to 1300 BCE came across descriptions of symptoms that sound remarkably similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In support of this idea, they said that the Assyrian soldiers “described hearing and seeing ghosts talking to them, who would be the ghosts of people they’d killed in battle – and that’s exactly the experience of modern-day soldiers who’ve been involved in close hand-to-hand combat.”
Interestingly, these Near Eastern records of what today would be called PTSD are earlier than the two other ancient examples often cited, that of Bronze Age Achilles in Homer’s Iliad and the Athenian warriors after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE described by Herodotus. Click here for zmescience “3,000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets document the earliest known case of PTSD”