Search results for "ancient"

Cólera en la provincia de Valencia según los partidos judiciales. Siglo xix

2013

Language in Central Europe: An Overview

2009

The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in north­eastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and …

Turkmenistan: Language Situation

2006

Turkmenistan, located in the Transcaspian region, has more than 4.8 million inhabitants, of which 85% are Turkmen, 5% Uzbeks, and 4% Russians. Its official national language is Turkmen, spoken by about 72%. Russian is spoken by 12%. In the post-Soviet period, the functions of Turkmen have been broadened and consolidated. Though the language policy aims at limiting the influence of Russian, this language has maintained much of its importance in public communication.

A late Eemian aridity pulse in central Europe during the last glacial inception

2005

How do ice ages begin? It's an obvious question to ask as we enjoy the relative luxury of an interglacial, but a hard one to answer. A look at past transitions may give some clues as to how this period will one day come to an end. A climate reconstruction based on sediments found beneath a lake in the Eifel mountains in Germany provides evidence of an extreme climate event lasting 468 years right at the end of the last interglacial. Dust storms, aridity, bushfires and the loss of trees associated with a warm climate coincided with a southward shift of the warm waters of the North Atlantic drift. In terms of insolation — the rate of delivery of the Sun's radiation to Earth — conditions then …

Durbi Takusheyi: a high-status burial site in the western Centralbilād al-sūdān

2012

Durbi Takusheyi is a burial site composed of at least eight mounds located between the modern towns of Katsina and Daura in northern Nigeria. Parts of the mounds were first excavated in 1907 by Herbert Richmond Palmer in cooperation with the Emir of Katsina and later again in 1992 in the course of a German research project under the lead of Dierk Lange, Bayreuth. After the 1992 excavation, the retained blocks were stored in the Jos Museum, Nigeria, for further analyses. In 2007 the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM) and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria (NCMM) started a project with the objective of completely restoring and analyzing the excavated artefacts…

The Postwar Years

2009

A few months after the capitulation of the German Reich on May 9, 1945, Huckel’s newly built house, that had withstood the ravages of war, was one of many in Marburg to be confiscated by the Americans. Huckel’s nervous condition deteriorated again under the heavy psychological pressure. His allusion to this in his autobiography was down to earth:

Obesity in Aging and Art

2009

THIS issue of Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences highlights new findings on obesity in older persons and its consequences for health and function (1,2,3). The obesity epidemic is spreading rapidly in both developed and developing countries, and perspectives on the negative effects of overweight and obesity abound in recent medical literature. What do we know so far about obesity over the lifetime? Obesity does not spare older persons (4). Obese older persons experience a wide range of negative consequences, including metabolic abnormalities, arthritis, pulmonary diseases, cataracts, cancer, impaired mobility, disability, and mortality. Given the already extensive knowledge base, why a…

La “Donna di Ostuni”, a case of eclampsia 28,000 years ago?

2017

La "Donna di Ostuni", the Lady from Ostuni (fortified medieval city, on the southern Italian Adriatic coast) is the skeleton of "the human most ancient mother" ever found by paleoanthropologists, grave dated of 28,000 years BP. It concerns a 20-years-old woman buried with her baby in her womb estimated at 8 months gestation. To date, the cause of the maternal-fetal deaths is qualified of unknown origin. We propose that eclampsia may be a possible explanation for these deaths (mother and baby together). Eclampsia (convulsions), the curse of human births (non-existent in other mammals), has been described since writings has existed 5000 years ago in all civilisations. This plausible descripti…

La Gipsoteca del Dipartimento Culture e Società dell'Università degli Studi di Palermo. Storia e catalogo

2017

Il volume presenta, per la prima volta, la storia e il catalogo della Gipsoteca del Dipartimento Culture e Società dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo. Si tratta di un’importante raccolta di calchi in gesso di sculture antiche, voluta da Antonino Salinas (1841-1914) ai tempi del suo magistero accademico e ora completamente riordinata, grazie a un nuovo allestimento curato dallo stesso autore di questo libro. The volume presents, for the first time, the history and catalog of the Gipsoteca of the Culture and Society Department of the University of Palermo. This is an important collection of plaster casts of ancient sculptures, commissioned by Antonino Salinas (1841-1914) at the time of hi…

Is the Anthropocene really worthy of a formal geologic definition?

2014

Scientists are actively debating whether the Anthropocene, the geologic time span (GTS) we are now living in, should be considered a period, epoch, or age in the geologic timescale. The solution is not easy, because the beginning of this GTS is undefined and the end unknown. In fact, there is no agreement on when the Anthropocene began, the proposed dates ranging from the Second World War, when radioactive fallout branded soils and sediments all over the world, to little after the end of the last glacial period, i.e. 11.7 thousand years ago, therefore coinciding with the onset of the Holocene. We are in favour of a concurrence of the Anthropocene with the Holocene, although a major impact …