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Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 yearsOne of the stone structures of the Shubayqa 1 site. The fireplace, where the bread was found, is in the middle. (Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 years - University of Copenhagen)Bread is the most common staple food in most parts of the world, apart from some areas of Asia where rice is prevalent. It is also one of the most diverse food products: Each region makes its own distinct varieties using doughs made from water mixed with wheat, rye, corn, or other common plant-derived ingredients. Bread also has significant cultural, even national, connotations: What would France be without its baguette and croissant?[1] Denmark without its rugbrød (rye bread) and smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches)?[2] The Arab world without pita? Every culture has developed its own types of bread that have, in many cases, become a culinary expression of identity. Baguettes, rye breads, tortillas, bagels, pitas, chapatis, focaccia, malooga (a flatbread found in Yemen), or nan[3] —if you live in Europe, the Americas, Africa, or most parts of Asia, there’s a good chance that bread accompanies at least one meal a day.At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago.It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years.[4] The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University College London and University of Cambridge have analysed charred food remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site – a site known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan.[5] The results, which are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread:“The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices. The 24 remains analysed in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking. The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey. So we now know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming. The next step is to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all,” said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, who is the first author of the study.[6]Swollen, gelatinized starch grain from the Paglicci grinding stone (Ancient pestle shows Paleolithic people ground oats for food)Although labor intensive, making simple bread is relatively straightforward: One only needs water, flour, and a suitable place to bake—something as simple as a hot, flat stone will work. Archaeologists have detected traces of starch on grinding tools dating to the Upper Paleolithic (11,500–50,000 years ago) at a number of archaeological sites in modern-day Russia[7] , Italy,[8] the Czech Republic[9] , and Israel.[10] Although some archaeologists think this means that humans started producing flour quite early on, these tools could have been used to squash or pound starchy plants for other reasons, such as to make gruel or porridge. Grinding tools are also quite rare in the Upper Paleolithic, so even if these tools were used only for making flour, it doesn’t appear to have been a very common activity.[11]Most archaeologists put the beginning of bread making in the Neolithic era, which first began around 11,500 years ago in southwest Asia.[12] In the Fertile Crescent—an arch-shaped region stretching from the Nile Valley through the Levant into Anatolia and Mesopotamia—charred plant remains excavated from archaeological sites, along with abundant grinding tools, flint sickles blades, and storage facilities, suggest that people had begun to cultivate wild wheat, rye, and barley, as well as legumes.[13] But what they produced from these plants has also been long debated. Some archaeologists assume it was bread, but other suggestions include porridge or beer.[14]The discovery of charred food remains has allowed for the reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire for the early production of bread-like products.[15] Results suggest the use of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals (e.g. wild einkorn) and club-rush tubers to produce flat bread-like products.[16] Cereal-based meals such as bread probably become staples when Neolithic farmers started to rely on the cultivation of domesticated cereal species for their subsistence.Natufian hunter-gatherers are of particular interest because they lived through a transitional period when people became more sedentary and their diet began to change. Flint sickle blades as well as ground stone tools found at Natufian sites in the Levant have long led archaeologists to suspect that people had begun to exploit plants in a different and perhaps more effective way.[17]Archaeologists find 14,400-year-old pita in Jordan's Black DesertShubayqa 1 consists of two well-preserved superimposed buildings, one of which is a semisubterranean structure with a carefully built flagstone pavement made of local basalt stones.[18] This structure comprises exclusively Natufian deposits with a rich assemblage of chipped stones, ground stone tools, animal bones, and plant remains.[19]The site was found and briefly dug by Allison Bets in the 1990s, and University of Copenhagen archaeologists have conducted four excavation seasons at the site from 2012 to 2015.[20]The flat bread found at Shubayqa 1 is the earliest evidence of bread making recovered so far, and it shows that baking was invented before plant cultivation. Indeed, it may be that the early and extremely time-consuming production of bread based on wild cereals may have been one of the key driving forces behind the later agricultural revolution where wild cereals were cultivated to provide more convenient sources of food.[21]All of this relies on new methodological developments that allows researchers to identify the remains of bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification.The charred food remains were analysed with electronic microscopy at a University College London lab by PhD candidate Lara Gonzalez Carratero (UCL Institute of Archaeology), who is an expert on prehistoric bread[22]:“The identification of ‘bread’ or other cereal-based products in archaeology is not straightforward. There has been a tendency to simplify classification without really testing it against an identification criteria. We have established a new set of criteria to identify flat bread, dough and porridge like products in the archaeological record. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy we identified the microstructures and particles of each charred food remain,” said Gonzalez Carratero.[23]The analyses carried out by the team involved the general description of the charred food remains (i.e., size, texture, particles, and inclusions) using low-magnification microscopy, and their examination under scanning electronic microscopy for the identification of plant particles (i.e., ingredients). Below are published images from the SEM analyses.Scanning electron microscope images of bread-like remains from the Shubayqa 1 site, Jordan: (A) a sample showing the typical porous matrix of bread with small closed voids; (B) detail of an aleurone layer from a sample (at least single celled); (C) a sample showing vascular tissue, the arrow marks the xylem vessels in longitudinal section (Archaeologists find earliest evidence of bread).The 24 remains analyzed in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking.[24] The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey.[25]The results allowed archaeologists to reconstruct the ingredients that went into this hunter-gatherer bread. The bread makers used flour ground from wild barley, einkorn, and oat. The remnants of Club-rush tubers, an aquatic plant of the family of papyrus (Cyperaceae), frequently present in the archaeobotanical assemblage from Shubayqa 1 were completely unexpected. These tubers were ground into flour, mixed with cereal flour, and likely baked on a hot stone to produce a flatbread product. The hunter-gatherer bread from Jordan was a multigrain and tuber bread—not necessarily what you might expect purely in terms of maximizing calories for the labor involved. (The plant remains in the fireplace also contained a surprisingly wide variety: from tubers to grasses, seeds, and fruit.)[26]http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/genome-ancient-barley-04034.htmlThe effort needed to produce bread from wild grains probably meant it was reserved for special occasions. Bread involves labour intensive processing which includes dehusking, grinding of cereals and kneading and baking.[27] That it was produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals.There are a few reasons that the inhabitants of Shubayqa 1 baked bread. First, baking can make some of the raw componants of bread more easily digestible and palatable.[28] Secondly, researchers believe that they could have baked bread right before abandoning the site, which would suggest that they were stocking up on "light, nutritional, and easily transportable foodstuff" that could be stored for a significant amount of time.[29] Thirdly, due to the intensive nature of the breadmaking process, bread could have been a special treat, saved for feast days or hosting important guests.Now that it is known that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming, the next step is to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all.What does this mean for our understanding of the processes that led to the appearance of agricultural economies in southwest Asia about 10,000 years ago? The transition from the hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Paleolithic to the agricultural economies of the Neolithic has long been seen as a fundamental stage in history. Archaeologists have debated when, where, and why this transition occurred, but given the long timespans involved, details have been elusive. It can be argued that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was, at its heart, not an economic or symbolic “revolution,” as has often been posited, but rather a food revolution—a matter of taste.[30] What has been lacking so far is a better understanding of what people actually ate and how they obtained and made their food.A grant recently awarded to the University of Copenhagen team will ensure that research into food making during the transition to the Neolithic will continue. The Danish Council for Independent Research recently approved further funding, which will allow archaeologists to investigate how people consumed different plants and animals in greater detail.[31] In the future, researchers hope to better understand why certain ingredients were favoured over others and were eventually selected for cultivation.Footnotes[1] Baguette - Wikipedia[2] Danish Rye Bread | traditional recipe[3] Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture's Origins[4] Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 years - University of Copenhagen[5] High Resolution AMS Dates from Shubayqa 1, northeast Jordan Reveal Complex Origins of Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant[6] Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan[7] Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing[8] Grinding flour in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (25000 years bp) | Antiquity | Cambridge Core[9] Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing[10] Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis[11] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264388620_Grinding_flour_in_Upper_Palaeolithic_Europe_25_000_years_bp[12] The science and magic of breadmaking[13] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318447092_Bread_in_Prehistory_looking_for_the_path_of_an_extraordinary_invention[14] r/AskReddit - Which came first, bread or beer?[15] New Discovery Proves That Humans Were Making Bread Before They Were Farming[16] Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan[17] Paleolithic human exploitation of plant foods during the last glacial maximum in North China[18] The Late Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic Occupation of the Black Desert (Jordan) - University of Copenhagen[19] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://journals.ed.ac.uk/lithicstudies/article/download/1647/2093/&ved=2ahUKEwj-mdLLvcrfAhWk7IMKHcz7Ck44ChAWMAV6BAgDEAE&usg=AOvVaw1o28DFPTY4x7z-djdg3o55[20] Excavations at the Late Epipalaeolithic Site of Shubayqa 1: Preliminary Report on the First Season[21] Did Hunter-Gatherers Intentionally Domesticate Wild Plants? | Archaeology, Biology | Sci-News.com[22] Archaeologists find earliest evidence of bread[23] Archaeologists find earliest evidence of bread[24] http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/genome-ancient-barley-04034.html[25] The Neolithic Period[26] Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan[27] World's oldest bread shows hunter-gathers were baking 4,000 years before birth of farming[28] The shocking truth about bread[29] New Discovery Proves That Humans Were Making Bread Before They Were Farming[30] Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture's Origins[31] Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 years - University of Copenhagen

This will sound strange, but the most alien Elves I have ever read about are… the real ones.That this should be the case is a sign of the way Elves have been taken over by fantasy authors and made into semi-magical Robin Hood figures with bows and straight blonde hair. The stereotype has been so persistent since the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” in 1936 that anything else becomes remarkable in contrast.Tolkien himself borrowed both his Elves and Dwarves from Norse (particularly Icelandic) sources, literary ones. With ancient sources providing little information about the characters of these peoples, Tolkien created vast backstories for the terms he borrowed, informed by his knowledge of Norse myth and legend and of folklore in general.However, he might have tried taking a trip to Reykjavik.It is remarkable to me to find that contemporary Icelanders seem never to have stopped believing in these down-to-earth nature spirits; and it is to Iceland we go to find the answer to your question.Elven churches and other structures appear to human eyes as natural features of the landscape, including old stumps, bushes, and boulders and rock formations. Elven habitations, believers say, need to be protected from development in order to maintain good relations with these spiritual beings. Photo of Iceland’s Gálgahraun lava field in autumn, taken by Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir.There are other Elves, whom some believe have the stature of men and can be capricious in how they relate to human beings in their vicinity. It is regarded as unwise to offend them, much like the fairies of Ireland, or the Manitou of the Great Lakes region of North America.I am talking specifically about those native to Iceland. Looking for an adorable little Elf for your shelf? Steer well clear of these Elves; they are a no-nonsense people. And it’s likely they’ve been in Iceland at least as long as there have been people.Jacqueline Simpson, a visiting professor at the University of Chichester’s Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy in England, said references to the word alfar, or elf, first appeared in the Icelandic record in Viking-era poems that date back to around 1000 AD. The older texts do not divulge much about what the elves do; they mainly focus on the activities of the gods. The more elaborate stories cropped up in the folklore of the 16th and 17th centuries and have ripened with age.The elves differ from the extremely tiny figures that are typically depicted as assistants to Santa Claus in popular American mythology. And unlike the fairies of Britain and other parts of Europe, Icelandic elves live and look very much like humans, according to Simpson and other experts. “You’ve got to get right up close before you can be sure it is an elf and not a human,” said Simpson, who began studying Old Icelandic in her undergraduate days and later compiled a book full of Icelandic legend translations. When elves are spotted, they are typically donning “the costume of a couple of hundred years ago,” when many of the stories really came alive.The Elves live much like the Icelanders themselves, and go about their affairs in much the same way. They are veiled from human sight, at least most of the time, as are their houses and other properties. But they are fiercely territorial, and a person who wants to remain on good relations with them needs to respect the landscape, because as likely as not, an Elf house, barn, or village may appear to our eyes as a distinctive boulder or standing stone, or perhaps another singular feature of the landscape.A blocky mass of hole-filled limestone, in this case overlooking a river, is the sort of formation that may represent a fairy shee, that is, a fairy town or castle protected by a glamour from humans. Fairies, like Elves and other folkloric beings, are often associated with natural features of the landscape. 2019 photo taken by the author while paddling north Florida’s Withlacoochee River.Their behavior is also similar to that of people: “[T]heir economy is of the same sort: like humans, the hidden people have livestock, cut hay, row boats, flense whales and pick berries,” Hafstein writes. “Like humans, they too have priests and sheriffs and go to church on Sundays.” This would explain the elf church in the lava field. According to Jónsdóttir, elves can range wildly in size, from a few centimeters to three meters in height. But Icelanders typically come into contact with the smaller ones: one “around one foot tall” and “the other...is perhaps similar to a 7-year-old child.” They may live in houses, sometimes with multiple floors, and, if you leave them alone, they’ll generally mind their own business. According to Simpson, “treat them with respect, do not upset their dwelling places, or try to steal their cattle, and they’ll be perfectly ... quite neutral, quite harmless.”The persistence of the belief in Elves in Iceland was highlighted in 2013 by objections to a road project that proposes to cut an ancient boulder field into four sections and place a traffic circle at its core. One of the strongest objections to the proposal has been a little out of the ordinary. It has been made by the Hraunavinir, or Friends of the Lava, who pose the environmental and cultural arguments thatthe thoroughfares would destroy some of the “amazingly beautiful lava formations” and spoil a habitat where birds flock and small plants flourish. One of Iceland’s most famous painters, Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval, once worked on his canvases there, perhaps magnetized by the charm of the terrain’s craggy natural relics.The sub-Arctic landscape of Labrador in eastern Canada - Markland to the Vikings who settled at L’Anse Aux Meadows on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula - is well suited to Nordic Elves, being glacial in origin and covered with miles and miles of granite. Glaciers sometimes carried large boulders long distances and deposited them randomly; such stones are known as erratics. I paid my respects when I took this photo in 2019; it was one of two such stones out of thousands I saw in the province that felt like good places to do so.However, the protestors have more reasons than these to refrain from disturbing the ancient lava formations.At least a few believe it will displace certain supernatural forces that dwell within the hallowed volcanic rubble, and fear the potentially dark consequences that come with such a disturbance. [Ragnhildur] Jónsdóttir, a greying and spectacled seer who also operates an “elf garden” in nearby Hafnarfjörður, believes the field is highly populated by elves, huldufolk (hidden people), and dwarves, many of whom, she says, have recently fled the area while the matter is settled.One of the many oddly shaped rocks at the lava field houses “a very important elf church,” which lies directly in the path of one of the roads, according to Jónsdóttir. Both she and another seer visited the field separately and came to the same conclusion about the spot. “I mean, there are thousands or millions of rocks in this lava field,” she said, “but we both went to the same rock or cliff and talked about an elf church.” She knows about the elf church because she can see it, she says, and also sense its energy, a sensation many Icelanders are familiar with.If a road is completely necessary, the elves will generally move out of the way, but if it is deemed superfluous, a possibility at Gálgahraun, “very bad things” might happen. “This elf church is connected by light energy to other churches, other places,” Jónsdóttir said. “So, if one of them is destroyed, it’s, uh, well, it’s not a good thing.”The Atlantic notes that this passionate folklorist is far from the only person in her nation to believe in at least the possible existence of Elves.It is fairly common for Icelanders to at least entertain the possibility of their existence. In one 1998 survey, 54.4 percent of Icelanders said they believed in the existence of elves. That poll is fairly consistent with other findings and with qualitative fieldwork, according to an academic paper published in 2000 titled “The Elves’ Point of View" by Valdimar Hafstein, who now is a folkloristics professor at the University of Iceland. “If this was just one crazy lady talking about invisible friends, it's really easy to laugh about that,” Jónsdóttir said. “But to have people through hundreds of years talking about the same things, it’s beyond one or two crazy ladies. It is part of the nation.”A boulder landscaped by nature with bright red bunchberries, fountain grasses, sphagnum moss, and other native plants on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Photo by the author (2020).Please allow me to close by stating my belief that it’s much more fun and interesting to give oneself permission to consider the possibility that Elves and their many cousins exist, than to take a hard line against them. Personally, I regard such a hard line as indefensible in the 21st Century.Many kinds of skepticism that seemed ironclad before mainstream physics begun entertaining current theories of multiple dimensions and parallel universes are ironclad no longer. The universe, it seems, is far stranger than we thought of in the 1900’s; cosmology, in other words, means never having to say you’re sorry… for believing in Elves.And if you need a philosophical or even religious justification for such a seemingly whimsical belief, consider this from Catholic Insight (“Are Fairies Catholic?”, June 2, 2020) citing not one but two Fathers of the Church, Origen and St. Augustine.“We indeed … maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally,—that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams,—that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons. (Origen, Contra Celsus, Book 8, ch. 3).”The simple, obvious interpretation is that “fairy” is a class of angel. This, indeed, follows from St. Augustine’s definition: “’Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit,’ from what they do, ‘angel.’’’ “Fairy” is simply a generic term for a spiritual being.If it’s good enough for St. Augustine, it’s good enough for me.

Europe surpassed Asia technologically by the year 1500. At that time, western Europe had already modernized its armies, navies, factories, banks, and universities to a level that notably surpassed anything available in Asia, and those advantages were starting to yield results in terms of European military victories and a re-organization of global trade routes in Europe’s favor. Below is the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, which by 1500 had educated Dante, Petrarch, Copernicus, and Albrecht Durer.Militarily, early modern Europe’s main advantages were plate armor, muskets, crossbows, and heavy cannon. Some Asian empires had some ability to make use of some of these weapons, but all of these weapons were standard for Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Swiss, Czech, and Venetian armies. Compared to Asian armies, European armies of 1500 typically had more of these ‘modern’ weapons per soldier, and each of those weapons would be higher quality. Below is the classic “tercios” formation invented by the Spanish in the 1400s, which made use of pikemen in full plate armor protecting squadrons of musketeers. Around 1500, the tercios drove the Muslims out of Spain and even conquered parts of Morocco and Libya. At about the same time, Russians equipped with muskets stood their ground on the Ugra River against the remnants of the Mongol hordes, shooting bullets further than the Mongols could fire their arrows and forcing the Mongols to turn around and go home empty-handed.By contrast, a typical Asian army of the period, even in developed urban areas, might be made up mostly of archers on horseback wearing lighter, looser jackets of chain mail that used much less iron and did not cover the soldier’s entire body:One of the major reasons why Europe had better weapons is that they were constantly fighting wars against each other, because Europe was uniquely divided against itself by its geography. The Vikings briefly ruled over much of northern Europe, but England and Norway and Denmark are separated by the North Sea, and the various Viking princedoms grew apart from each other into separate nations. The Franks briefly ruled over much of central Europe, but France and Italy are separated by the tall snowy peaks of the Alps, and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire quickly split up into warring city-states. The Muslims briefly ruled over much of Southern Europe, but the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of the Pyrenees and the deserts of Libya split off Spain and Morocco from Egypt and Turkey, all of which quickly became different countries. There was never any real possibility of one culture or one empire coming to rule over all of Europe; it just has too many seas and mountains in the way to be effectively bridged with medieval technologies. This spurred military competition: no matter how many wars you won, there was always another powerful, densely populated enemy on your border. Europeans were never exactly safe; there was always another war to fight, and having a few more weapons or slightly better weapons could mean the difference between being safe and being slaughtered.This was simply not the case in most of Asia, where fertile river valleys supported huge populations that were separated from each other by thousands of miles. The Mughal Empire, which ruled all of south Asia in a unified government, had no pressing reason to expand — if they owned five provinces of frosty Afghani mountains or thick Bengali jungles instead of four provinces, it wouldn’t make much practical difference to the Emperor, let alone to a common craftsman. The population was all centered in the core of the empire, and the empire could be pretty darn sure of successfully protecting that core against any outside intruders. Nobody was going to invade the Mughals: literally nobody in the world had the logistical ability to supply an army across the Himalayas or across the entire Indian Ocean. Same thing with China: all they had to do was have an army that was powerful enough to put down low-tech peasant riots and low-tech barbarian raids. Once the urban Chinese core successfully co-opted the horse archery techniques of the Mongols, barbarians like the Mongols simply didn’t have any advantages that could be used to seriously threaten the Chinese state. The Chinese had better numbers, better organization, better training, and better equipment. As a result, the Chinese government could put out a lukewarm, stale effort at military defense and still utterly crush all of its local opponents. No European power ever had it so easy.Another reason why Europe had better weapons is that Europe was uniquely blessed with high-quality deposits of iron ore right next to moderately fertile farmlands: one major deposit in Flanders, and another major deposit in Silesia. These areas are hilly, forested, and slightly chilly; they weren’t suitable for Stone Age agriculture. But after a few millennia of civilization, when the plow and the yoke and the shovel and the wheelbarrow and the saw mill and crop rotation had all been invented and popularized — i.e., right around 1200 C.E. — these regions suddenly became very nice places for farming and were able to support quite large populations.There are better seams of iron ore if all you care about is the raw metal: the world’s richest deposits are in northern Sweden, central Siberia, northern Quebec, the Gobi Desert, the Australian Outback, and the western Sahara. However, all of these places were agriculturally hopeless, even with medieval technology. There was no way to grow enough food nearby to feed the workers in a large-scale mining operation, and there was no way to ship in food that had been grown elsewhere — horses and rowboats are *slow*, and you have to feed the drivers or sailors every day that they’re trudging through the wilderness. As a result, the cost of getting iron out of the ground in Asia was enormous compared to the cost of iron in Europe.So on the one hand, you have an easy supply of iron in Europe, because there’s all this metal in the ground right next to some booming farming towns that are growing a nice surplus that can be sent to feed the miners. On the other hand, you have a huge demand for iron in Europe, because every government is constantly at war with every other government, most of which are roughly even in power level with each other, and so if they can get slightly better iron armor or slightly better iron cannons, then that could be the margin of victory and survival.Every century, the European weapons got a little better: the craftsmen were paid well to find a way to forge a larger, more solid piece of metal, or roll the metal into a flatter, more uniform sheet, or improve the metal with convenient gadgets, like a wheellock match instead of a smoldering piece of rope.And so now instead of a dinky little tube shooting irregular little marbles:You’ve got an impressive tunnel of explosive might throwing huge cannonballs:These strictly military achievements were paired with a series of commercial, naval, and navigational advantages that allowed Europeans to project their power all over the world. At the Battle of Diu, off the coast of India in 1509, a small fleet of 18 Portugese warships out-fought a much larger fleet of 180 Mamluk warships, sinking or capturing every single enemy vessel. Part of that victory was the result of the larger, more accurate, safer cannons carried by the Europeans. But part of it was due to a remarkable series of advances in sailing technology — the astonishing thing is not just that the Portuguese won, but that they were able to reach the coast of India in the first place. Using new configurations of sails together with the compass, the sextant, the hourglass, and a detailed understanding of geometry and geography that had worked its way out of the royal courts and into the middle classes, Europeans were able to sail into the rough seas of the Atlantic, around the cape of South Africa, and thousands of miles north to the coasts of India — and arrive not just alive but with the resources and desire to set up successful trading outposts and fiefdoms.Again, part of these advances were due to simple geography: compared to the Persians, the Indians, or the Chinese, the Europeans had always had more miles of coastline and a more urgent need to cross medium-sized bodies of water; the Roman rowboats had a natural incentive to progress through the Viking longship and Venetian brigantines to the Portuguese caravels, because each advance opened up new trade routes that brought categorical increases in wealth and safety. By contrast, Zhang He’s football-field-sized treasure ships may have been visually impressive, but there was little they could bring back from Java or even from Madagascar that was not already for sale in Nanjing: China already controlled most of the people and wealth that could be reached by sailing out of Chinese ports.The other part of the advances were fueled by an cascading cycle of improvements in finance, mechanization, and urbanization: a positive feedback loop that ultimately became known as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution is usually thought of as something that started in the 1800s, with smoke and coal and enormous assembly lines, but the seeds of that revolution were laid in the 1400s, when Europe erected tens of thousands of windmills and waterwheels that largely replaced slave labor as the major source of physical energy in the European economy.It’s astonishing how much these new machines were used for as early as 1500: they didn’t just grind barely into flour and crush flax seeds into linen cloth, although that was incredibly important. They also provided the power to swing hammers, saw through wood, squeeze oil out of olives, hoist cargo out of ships, and a thousand other conveniences and necessities. The whole economy ran on renewable energy. It’s fashionable today to remind people that European cities were small compared to Asian cities in the 1500s, and that’s true: Paris had only 185,000 people and Milan had only 110,000 residents at a time when Nanjing had a full 1,000,000. What those figures don’t tell you is that each mechanic in Paris did the work of a dozen Chinese laborers: it’s just easier to get stuff done when you’re using machines to harness vast natural forces instead of literally moving everything by hand.All of this newfound motive power was directed with new levels of efficiency using banks, guilds, insurance contracts (1347), the printing press (1440), double-entry accounting (1458), and independent republics such as the Hanseatic League, the Swiss Confederacy, and the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire, where decisions were made by a vote of local merchants, rather than by generals or kings. Although many of these developments were inspired by earlier Chinese inventions (e.g., paper currency, authorized by the Song dynasty in 1024), by 1500 much of the Chinese economy had returned to near-subsistence levels, with trade conducted by casual peddlers.The painting below, dated to 1495, quietly but forcefully sums up many of the trends mentioned above: it shows a portrait of Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and Franciscan monk from Florence who is credited (heh) with inventing double-entry accounting and teaching math to Leonardo da Vinci. His left hand rests on a typeset, bound book explaining his financial systems. His right hand is tracing a geometric proof, which would have been useful for understanding the proportions in the metal dodecahedron on the right-hand side of the painting…because there is so much iron laying around that it can be used to amuse mathematicians, instead of being hoarded for industry or weapons. The portrait casually displays a variety of finely made glass, furs, silks, linens, felt, and a large sturdy table, all of which were available to the growing middle classes as well as to noble lords. The painting demonstrates a mastery of anatomy, perspective, and optics. Perhaps most strikingly, all of these achievements were celebrated: the painting flaunts the accumulation of knowledge and thought at least as much as the accumulation of wealth or power. I am not aware of any city in Asia that could have produced anything like this painting in 1500, or, for that matter, in 1700.