“Although cow bones and charred seeds cannot easily be displayed in the national museum, archaeology is not about collecting pretty things but about solving problems, so in the following pages much attention is devoted to animal bones and charred seeds.””
“Southern resistance, had made the contest an “Abolition war.” Northern Democrats and white Southerners denounced “abolition war” as the inhumane path to sanguinary race war. Both sides felt something deeply sacred at stake, and no one more than Douglass. Yes, he acknowledged, the war was for Union and for the Constitution, but it must be a wholly new Union, and a new Constitution to replace the old one now torn and tattered. The country must not “put old wine in new bottles,” he argued, nor make “new cloth into old garments.” Douglass warned that liberal and open-minded people such as abolitionists themselves were rarely as unified as the forces of reaction and darkness. But in this historic moment, they had to be. “That old union,” he shouted, “whose canonized bones we saw hearsed in death and inurned under the frowning battlements of Sumter, we shall never see again while the world standeth.” Stop fighting for a “dead past,” Douglass urged his auditors, and instead fight “for the living present.”9 Here flowed a set of rebirth metaphors flaming, bloody, and much bolder than the succinct, if beautiful, suggestion in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “Mission of the War” stood as Douglass’s radical””
“The animal-bone evidence from the Near East suggests that wool sheep appeared after about 3400 BCE. Because sheep were not native to Europe, domesticated Near Eastern sheep were imported to Europe by the first farmers who migrated to Europe from Anatolia about 6500 BCE. But the mutation for longer wool might have appeared as an adaptation to cold winters after domesticated sheep were introduced to northern climates, so it would not be surprising if the earliest long-wool sheep were bred in Europe.””
