Trudy Myers's Blog, page 27

Tepary Beans

When I was researching for my blog post on the Tohono O'odham people, one of the foods they relied on was the ‘white tepary bean’. With my New Year’s Resolutions in mind (#3. Eat more wisely), I thought I would research these beans to see how they compare to the more traditional beans I grew up eating. Not because I plan to add these to my diet (although I could... at least one of my sources will gladly sell me a pound or more, complete with cooking instructions), but because if I’m going to think of food between meals, I should probably make it healthy types of food and not left-over Christmas candy. Or any kind of candy.
The information on the O’odham people specified white tepary beans, but there are many varieties of tepary beans. One source even listed several wild varieties, which they will sell me a packet of 50 to grow in my own garden. Alas, Florida is not the same climate as the Sonora Desert, so I don’t think they would grow here very well. Especially with me being the unskilled gardener than I am.
Tepary beans - including the white varieties - are native to the Sonoran Desert. They were first domesticated in Northwest Mexico some 4,000 years ago. The ‘secrets’ of growing and using them were passed down from generation to generation, particularly among the O’odham people. Being a desert plant, they are tolerant of heat, drought and alkaline soil. In the last 30 years, tepary beans have spread to other arid regions worldwide.
Beans are already super foods, but tepary beans are even higher in protein (21 grams in 1/2 cup!) and fiber. Their fiber helps control cholesterol and diabetes. These small beans have a meaty, dense texture and are savory in taste. White versions are slightly sweet, while the browner versions have a more earthy taste. And even with all this fiber, tepary beans produce less gassiness than other beans like navy, pinto or kidney beans.
During the 1920’s, Tohono O’odham farmers grew 1.5 million pounds of tepary beans per year. However, during the 1930’s, increased mechanization and irrigation led to less tepary beans being grown, and by the 1950’s, teparay beans were extremely rare.
Native Seeds/SEARCH began to promote the use of tepary seeds in the 1970’s and 80’s, and today they conserve nearly 100 versions of domesticated and wild tepary beans, adapted to low and high desert environments.
Their website had pictures of different varieties, so I compared the ‘domesticated’ to the ‘wild’ types. The domesticated beans seemed very much like navy or pinto beans in shape, and each bean looked pretty much the same as all the others of that type. But the wild varieties were much more angular and looked more like pebbles, all the same color. I imagine the angular edges are from more seeds being crowded into one pod, and they squish each other trying to get as big as they can.
We can call Florida many things, but ‘desert’ is not one of them. Maybe I could try to grow them in pots in the house, but they like temperatures as high or higher than 100°F, and we have the air conditioning on long before the house gets that hot. I am NOT heat tolerant, and if the house ever got to temperatures teparies like, I would not just wilt, I would try to melt.
Guess I’ll just have to order a pound and see what they’re like.

https://www.ranchogordo.com/products/white-teparyhttp://store.ramonafarms.com/White-Tepary-Beans-STOTOAH-BAVI/productinfo/BTEPWH1/https://www.nativeseeds.org/collections/tepary-beanshttps://www.nativeseeds.org/pages/tohono-oodham-white-tepary-bean

Ancient Crime

Archaeologists have discovered that crime - particularly fraud and counterfeiting - are not new types of human activity. They can now prove that these underhanded dealings have been happening for millennium.
The evidence comes from 2 archeological sites in Spain; La Molina cave and the Cova del Gegant cave. At La Molina, 10 people were buried with goods that included pottery, bone awls, objects carved from ivory and amber beads. This site dates back to the 3rd millennium BC.
At the Cova del Gegant, an estimated 19 people were buried, dating from the 2nd millennium BC. These people were accompanied by pottery and ornamental beads made of lignite, coral, amber, shell and gold.
The amber beads tricked many archaeologists, but tests revealed that not all of them were real amber. Some of the ‘amber’ beads found at Cova del Gegant were found to be pieces of mollusk shell core coated with pine resin, and these were mixed in with real amber beads. The fake amber beads from La Molina were seeds coated with resin. Apparently this type of surface coating effectively emulated the translucence, shine and color of amber. In fact, similar methods of imitating turquoise in the Levant have been identified from the 6th millennium BC.
People started to trade commodities thousands of years ago in Europe. Amber was highly valuable and was used by leaders to cultivate an image of power and wealth. Some amber was brought to Spain from the Baltic Sea, but another trade route was through Sicily, which also supplied ivory, Alpine jade and cinnabar.
So why create fake amber beads? Perhaps there wasn’t enough real amber to fill the demand for it. Perhaps the traders - or their suppliers - saw a way to make ‘a fast buck’. And although the exotic goods buried with these people showed that they could afford the real thing, perhaps their survivors saw no reason to waste all the real, expensive stuff by burying it forever.
I heard it said once that ‘counterfeiting’ was the oldest profession, save one. At the time, I thought that was an overstatement. Maybe I was wrong.


https://www.newsweek.com/5000-year-old-fake-amber-beads-found-spanish-burial-sites-first-example-1406723

Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.
At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.
In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.
What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.
I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.
I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.
I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.
That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.
I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.
Wish me luck! And perseverance.

Kenorland

Not to be confused with Kennerland, a theme park (based on a toy company) I just made up when I stumbled across the name of this supercontinent.
Kenorland was one of the earliest supercontinents, having formed about 2.72 billion years ago. It accreted some cratons that already existed, but also found some new continental crust to merge with. Pieces of it would later become Laurentia (most of North America and Greenland), Baltica (todays’ Scandinavia and Baltic regions), Yilgarn (Western Australia), and Kalaharia (large portions of South America and Africa).
It is known that Kenorland sat in low latitudes until great underground magma surges started to cause tearing of the crust about 2.48 billion years ago. At about that time, Baltica straddled the equator and was connected to Laurentia (Canadian Shield), Kola and Karelia (2 pieces that have since rejoined with Baltica).
It is thought that the breakup of Kenorland may have been when the Earth shifted from tearing caused by magma plumes to the modern plate tectonics we know today. However, the discovery of an earlier continent and a supercontinent may indicate this transition occurred even earlier.
By 2.45 billion years ago, Yilgarn (Western Australia) was no longer connected to the other cratons, and Kola and Karelia cratons were also drifting away. Therefore, there was longer a supercontinent, and this was about the same time as the Huronian glaciation, which lasted up to 60 million years. Indications are that atmospheric oxygen rose from 0.1% to 1%. This increase in oxygen caused the virtual disappearance of the gas methane, which was oxidized into carbon dioxide and water.
Furthermore, the breakup of Kenorland generally increased continental rainfall, reducing the other greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Also, the solar output at that time was less than 85% of its current power, and all these circumstances together produced a runaway “Snowball Earth”, where average temperatures planet-wide fell to below freezing.
Wow, that’s a pretty drastic response to a supercontinent not being able to hold itself together.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenorland

Everybody’s Heard of Gondwana

Gondwana existed from about 550 million years ago until 180 million years ago. It is one of the most well known super-continents, in the sense that more people have at least heard of it, rather than individual cratons like Avalonia or Baltica.
If I’m reading the information correctly, Gondwana existed both before and after Pangaea. Before Pangaea, it came into being when several cratons stuck together, beginning about 800 million years ago with the formation of the East African Orogeny, which involved the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa. Between 600 to 530 million years ago, this group added South America, Australia and Antarctica, in that order. Thus Gondwana was born.
Eventually, it merged with Laurasia and became Pangaea, sometime around 335 million years ago. But it wasn’t an easy relationship, you might say. Pieces of what had formerly been Gondwana kept breaking off, drifting north to join the former Laurasia section, such as bits of China and Indo-China. The western edge of Pangaea was beginning to break up while the eastern edge was trying to collect itself together.
Meanwhile, the formation of Pangaea and its mountains greatly impacted sea levels and global climate, producing glaciers and continent-wide sedimentation.
But what about Gondwana? About 175 million years ago, it had had enough and broke away. But it didn’t come out of it unscathed. Besides the bits that had already drifted to ‘the other side’, Florida, southern Georgia and Alabama stayed attached to North America.
Once it separated from its partner, Gondwana just kept falling apart. About 132 million years ago, Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar broke off and then broke up, going their separate ways. South America slowly broke away from Africa, starting in the south and going north, but the exact timing is uncertain. It could have started as early as 190 million years, and finally finished around 85 million years ago.
So, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that most of the cratons that formed Gondwana now inhabit the southern hemisphere. Its remnants account for about 2/3 of today’s continental area, including Africa, Antarctica, Arabia, Australia, Indian Subcontinent and South America.
If I were a paleo-geologist, I might have made more sense out of the wiki articles I consulted on this subject. The writer of these articles - particularly the one on Gondwana - seemed to think that anybody who was looking up this subject must be a student, for he/she/it kept using names and terms that I - as a lay person - did not know, leading to much confusion on my part. It seemed far more detailed than I felt I could fit into a blog, anyway, so I skipped lightly through most of it, looking for the important details without bogging down the blog.
Paleo-geology was going to be an elective of mine in college, but I didn’t get that far. Hmm, anybody got a good used textbook on the subject?



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwanahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

A Brief Study of EuramericaSometimes it’s called Eurameri...

A Brief Study of Euramerica
Sometimes it’s called Euramerica, sometimes it’s known as Laurussia (not to be confused with Laurasia). It’s called a minor supercontinent because it consisted of several (3) cratons, which are pieces of crust that include land.
About 410 million years ago, the Laurentian (most of North America), the Baltica (Baltic states) and Avalonia cratons all slammed together to form Euramerica. Avalonia was the smallest of the 3; a microcontinent that was long and skinny and sat along the southern border. Euramerica appears to have sat pretty squarely on the equator and was mostly covered with tropical rainforests.
Around 300 million years ago, the climate changed rather abruptly. Many of the lycopsids - such as clubmosses - were replaced by ferns. There was a great loss of diversity in amphibians while the reptiles diversified.
Later, Euramerica became part of the major supercontinent Pangaea. When Pangaea broke into two continents - Gondwana and Laurasia - Euramerica was a part of Laurasia.
Eventually, Laurasia split into the continents of North America and Eurasia. The Laurentian craton became a big portion of North America. Baltica became part of Eurasia. Avalonia ceased to be a long skinny microcontinent as bits of it became some of the east coast of North America, and bits became parts of Ireland, England and other areas of southern Europe.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euramericahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalonia

Poor Science or Poor Writing

The other day, my husband and I watched a movie we’d never heard of. The setting of the story was that Earth had been in winter for the past 300 years, and it would continue for thousands of years. The only humans that still existed lived 10 kilometers under the surface, where they used geothermal energy as their power source. They had created a race of ‘humans’ to do their work for them, including sex workers, but nobody ever indicated what type of work this ‘inferior’ race did, except for the one sex worker.
Hubby had difficulty with Arizona being covered in snow and ice, with daytime temperatures of -60° F. In the latest ice age, the glaciers never reached the sw states. To me, that said the the earth was not just in an ice age, but had entered a ‘snowball earth’ ice age, where the entire globe is frozen.
How did the ice age winter begin? The characters gave 2 theories, but didn’t know which was right. The first theory was that an asteroid had struck the earth, throwing up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that most of the sunlight couldn’t get to the ground. The second theory was that it was a bomb that threw up all that dust and debris.
Okay, yes, a lot of dust and debris in the atmosphere can reflect enough sunlight to produce some very chilly results. Large volcanos can produce enough dust to chill the entire globe as the dust rides through the atmosphere. BUT, such dust doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.
What about the asteroid that ‘killed the dinosaurs’? you may ask. Yes, that threw up a lot of dust and debris. But what killed so much of the flora and fauna was the firestorm produced by the heat released when the asteroid hit. Think of it as a huge explosion, so hot the heat wave raced around the globe, burning almost everything it touched. There may have been a long winter afterwards, but all that dust and stuff did settle out in a fairly short amount of time.
The plot was that a squad of ‘normal’ military-type humans had to go out into the world to track down a renegade ‘inferior’ made human. The squad's DNA was changed to allow them to survive in the far-below-zero temperatures, but that would only last for 48 hours. I had a little trouble accepting that, but... okay, let’s see what they do with it.
The scene that got me was right after they arrived on the surface. It had been stated that ‘all the animals’ were gone. But what they see right after they arrive on the surface was a man fishing. He had chopped a hole in the top of a small rivulet of water racing over the snow/ice, and had actually caught a fish, but seeing that he was going to be interrupted, he put the fish back.
I really couldn’t accept that. If all the animals had died, where did this fish come from? Okay, maybe they were mistaken. But at the temperatures they were talking about, I would expect that little rivulet to be frozen solid, and the fish with it.
It didn’t help that long after the main character had been on the surface for 48 hours, the main character was still chasing the renegade, with his head bare and no gloves. Frostbite was completely ignored.
It was not a good movie. If you are going to change the rules of life (daytime temperatures of -60F), then you (the writer) have to follow those new rules. And it is easy to have characters who don’t know what happened to end the civilization we (the audience) are familiar with. It’s easy for the writer, but it’s not satisfying to the audience.

Thoughts About Laurentia

Okay, Laurentia is not a super-continent, although it has been involved in those. It is today known as the North American Craton, because it is a bit of crust that makes up about the eastern 2/3 of North America. Originally, this craton included Greenland and a piece of Scotland, but those have split off.
The base of Laurentia is composed of metamorphic and igneous rocks formed 1.5 to 1 billion years ago. Above that are younger sedimentary rocks that were deposited when most of the craton was covered by a shallow (with a depth of no more than 200 feet) tropical sea where much marine life lived and died, settled to the bottom and eventually became rock such as limestone and dolomites.
During the Cretaceous Period, this type of sea - known as the Western Interior Seaway - ran from today’s Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, diving North American into eastern and western land masses
The southwestern area of Laurentia has been deformed by continental collisions and has been stretched up to 100% of its original width. This area has experienced numerous large volcanic eruptions.
Laurentia sat on the equator some 458-444 million years ago.
About 1.82 billion years ago, Laurentia was part of the supercontinent Columbia. But by 1.35-1.3 billion years ago, Laurentia was an independent continent.
1.3 billion years ago, Laurentia joined other bits to form the supercontinent Protorodinia, and by 1.07 billion years ago, enough bits had joined to become the supercontinent Rodinia. This article didn’t mention when Rodinia broke apart.
750 million years ago, Laurentia had again joined others to form Protolaurasia, but Laurentia very nearly drifted away from the others. Still, it stuck around at least until 600 million years ago, when they formed the supercontinent Pannotia. (I’ve already written about that.)
419.2 to 358.9 million years, Laurentia and Baltica collided, forming Euramerica.
298.9 to 252.1 million years ago, all the ‘big boys’ got together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. That lasted until 201.3 to 145 million years ago, when Pangea broke into 2 supercontinents: Laurasia and Gondwana. Laurentia was part of Laurasia.
145 to 66 million years ago, Laurentia was again an independent continent. And about 23 million years ago, North America (Laurentia) crashed against South America, forming the minor supercontinent America.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentia

The Dorset culture

Starting around 500 BC and lasting 1500 to 2000 years, the Arctic area of North America was inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo culture. It is named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut in Canada, where the first evidence of it was found. It is said to have 4 phases due to differences in the technology related to hunting and tool making. Dorset artifacts include triangular end-blades, soapstone lamps, and burins, a specific type of stone tool.
The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. They appear to have been extinct by 1500 AD at the latest, and possibly as early as 1000 AD. At some time during the 1000s, the Thule people (a pre-Innuit group) began migrating east from Alaska, and eventually spread through all the land previously inhabited by the Dorset. There is no evidence that the Inuit and the Dorset ever met. In fact, genetic studies show that the Dorset were distinct from later groups and that there is virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and Thule peoples.
Inuit legends say that they did encounter people they called ‘First Inhabitants’. According to these stories, the first inhabitants were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but they were afraid to interact and were easily frightened off. There is also a controversial theory of contact and trade between the Dorset and the Norse.
Some of the artifacts that indicated a culture different from the Inuit included sophisticated pieces of art. Carvings featured uniquely large hairstyles for women, and both sexes are depicted wearing hoodless parkas with large, tall collars.
Not only do scientists not know for certain what happened to the Dorset people, they aren’t sure where they came from, either. Some have suggested that they may have developed from a previous culture, perhaps the Pre-Dorset, the Saqqaq or - even less likely - from the Independence I. However, these earlier cultures all had bow and arrow technology, while the Dorsets did not. Possibly they set aside the bow and arrow as they switched from land to aquatic hunting.
Another piece of technology that the Dorset lacked was drills. There are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Whatever holes they created, they painstakingly carved or gouged into the artifact where it was needed. This was even true of the bone needles that are so common in Dorset sites. It is confusing, since the Pre-Dorset and the Thule had and used drills to great effect.
However little has been discovered about the Dorset people, their history is divided into 4 periods: The Early (500-1 BC), Middle (1-500 AD), and Late phases (500-1000 AD), as well as the Terminal phase from 1000 AD onward. The Terminal phase would have been closely related to the Medieval Warm Period, which began to warm the Arctic around 950 AD. Under those conditions, the sea ice became far less predictable.
The Dorset were adapted to a very cold climate, and it is thought that much of their food consisted of sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice. A massive decline in sea ice would have forced the Dorset further north. Most agree they disappeared at some point between 1000 and 1500 AD, possibly because they could not adapt to the climate change or perhaps because they were introduced to diseases they had not known before.
I wish the article had included some type of rendition of the triangular end-blades. I have a series of stories in the works about a culture that is based on the number 3, and I keep imagining them developing 3-sided blades of all sizes, even arrow-heads. But I don’t know enough about bladed weapons to know if such a shape would be feasible. Anybody have any ideas about that?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

Baltica

Despite my confusion over the location of ‘the Baltic States’, they are right where normal people would expect them; along the Baltic Sea. Somehow, over the years, my mind had decided that the otherwise-un-named Baltic states were located immediately north and northwest of Greece. However, I looked them up (for the sake of this blog), and boy, was I wrong. I had put these states in Eastern Europe, but way too far south.
The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are in Eastern Europe, snuggled up east of the Baltic Sea and west of the Ural Mountains of Asia. And that places them right on the protocontinent of Baltica!
So, yes, this is kind of related to the Supercontinents blogs, but I’m only going to explore this one little piece of crust. Sometimes it roamed around on its own. At other times, it gathered together with other pieces of crust. Right now, it is smooshed between NorthEastern Europe and NorthWestern Asia. Will it succumb and eventually be pushed under these larger plates, or will it somehow break free again? I don’t know. But let’s see what is known about it.
The thick core of Baltica is also known as the East European Craton and is more than 3 billion years old.
About 2 billion years ago, small pieces of crust started colliding. These included Sarmatia (which was the Ukrainian Shield and Voronezh Massif*) and Volgo-Uralia. That seemed to work pretty well, so about 1.8 billion years ago, they added Fennoscandia, which included the Baltic Shield.
Now, if I’m reading the articles right, about 750 million years ago, Baltica and Laurentia (most of North America) both rotated clockwise, bumped each other lightly and headed for the south pole. At some point (possibly 650 million years ago), it is postulated that Earth became completely covered in snow and ice. (Yes, Snowball Earth.)
It turns out that Siberia was located fairly close to the South Pole, too, and it apparently didn’t take long for Siberia to completely lose its cool. According to one theory, Siberia started having some severe volcanic eruptions, and the build-up of green house gases in the atmosphere from that source resulted in a complete melt-down of all that snow and ice in as little as 2,000 years.
Anyway, Laurentia beat feet and headed north, but Baltica remained in the south at least long enough to hang around Gondwanaland. After that, Baltica drifted north and approached Laurentia again. However, around 425 million years ago, Scotland-Greenland and Norway all collided together, forcing Baltica to look elsewhere for new continental buddies.
Just when you thought you’d found a friend. Poor Baltica.


* Now a piece of Central Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balticahttps://www.google.com/search?q=baltic+states&oq=Baltic+states&aqs=chrome.0.0l6.4638j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8