Jacob

@iacobuscaesar.bsky.social

1262 Followers 1042 Following

I have an MA in archaeology and run a blog called Living in the Longue Durée about ancient history and whatever else. This profile is mostly funny observations about history and science. Blog: https://livinginthelongueduree.com Ask if you want Discord.

Bubbel.
A Kushan carved panel showing the Buddha in a meditative lotus position giving a teaching and wearing his classic long flowing robe with his hair up. The carving is in the Hellenistic style and is surrounded by a decorative wreath and a halo. To the Buddha’s left is his protector Vajrapani, who here is syncretized with both Heracles and Zeus. The muscular body of Heracles is depicted with his powerful abs and revealed genitals as well as his own cloak, possibly the Nemean lion’s pelt. But Vajrapani’s thunderbolt takes the form more reminiscent in Greek art of the bolt of Zeus.
Lucy the Australopithecus afarensis standing next to a watering hole.
Man flipping a calendar from 2026 to March 1922 while his wife reads the headline “Police detain Indian opposition leader Gandhi as protests continue to grow.”
Patches, a mutt, lies on the white tile floor of our house while I pet him.
Monarch caterpillar munching on a milkweed branch through the mesh of a classroom butterfly cage. My Snapchat caption says, “The caterpillars like their milkweed, yum, yum.”
Screenshot of my iPad with the Bluesky app centered. It is shaped as if on a phone screen, leaving ample open space on either side of the app window where my default background is visible.
Outside the window of our cabin in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, a doe is visible. She at first stands still and then bounces along past the vantage points of several windows. My mom exclaims in the background about her hopping. The Snapchat caption says “Hoppy deer.”
A Snapchat picture captioned “Look at Mt. Adams today.” Mt. Adams appears as a snow-capped summit poking up above forested hills in the Cascade Range in Washington. Grasses and wild plants are in the foreground.
My hand in front of a computer with a great white shark finger puppet on my finger. On the computer screen is an alarmingly long footnote about the extinction of megafauna from Pleistocene North America and the Clovis culture.
Hitler declared the Japanese people as Honorary Aryans, which granted them equal rights.
Image of a Harlan’s ground sloth (Paramylodon harlani) from the US National Park Service website about White Sands National Park.
The Megatherium americanum from Walking With Beasts, reared up on its hind legs to feed from a tree. Several Macrauchenia are visible in the background.
Remi the big goldendoodle lying on a carpet in the cabin living room between a couch and a chair with a telescope in the corner. Out the windows in the background are the hills and fir forests of Washington.
View out the window of one of the bedrooms of the mountain cabin my parents have in Washington near Mt. St. Helens. The sheets of the bed can be seen in the foreground with a patio beyond a screen door and beyond that various wild grasses and fur trees. In the distance are the rolling hills of the Cascade Range.
My hand with a finger puppet of a narwhal on it.
Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) by Mårten Eskil Winge.
Yuan Dynasty textile showing a group of six dragons with twisting contorting bodies surrounded by flowers. The dragons are scaly and serpentine in forms with feathery details and the antlers of deer. These particular ones are five-toed as is tradition.
Mill Ends Park, where a bush sits in a bit of dirt in a ring of concrete along Naito Parkway.
A black-and-white photograph of We’wha wearing a long dress and necklace and holding a basket, all traditional Zuni garb.
Remi the goldendoodle relaxing on the carpet in my parents’ living room.
A page from Translating Maya Hieroglyphs by Scott A. J. Johnson showing a very basic exercise meant to practice identifying glyph blocks and columns for reading order. The sample text is a very dense piece from the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs at Palenque.
Translating Maya Hieroglyphs by Scott A. J. Johnson.
Skircle.
An 1823 facsimile of the original 1776 United States Declaration of Independence.
Various Sumerian votive figurines with wide eyes.
Me in bed giving a thumbs up.
The Argead star, having a flower pattern in the center surrounded by two concentric circles and eight rays on the first layer around that with eight more rats around that.
The Komodo dragon has a tail as long as its body, as well as about 60 frequently replaced, serrated teeth that can measure up to 2.5 cm (1 in) in length. Its saliva is frequently blood-tinged because its teeth are almost completely covered by gingival tissue that is naturally lacerated during feeding. It also has a long, yellow, deeply forked tongue.
Size comparison of Thylacoleo carnifex from “New Skeletal Material Sheds Light on the Palaeobiology of the Pleistocene Marsupial Carnivore, Thylacoleo carnifex” by Wells and Camens, 2018. Thylacoleo is shown standing about three quarters of a meter high and stretching a little under two meters long.
Illustration of the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, as drawn for the July 12, 1914 issue of the Italian newspaper La Domenica del Corriere. The image shows Princip striding forward after removing a hat with his pistol drawn and firing. He has just taken a shot at the archduke who stares forward as if falling dead and now aims at his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. The archduke and duchess are in a car whose driver stares in horror while a number of soldiers and guards surge forward too late.
He made a statement so incertae sedis even his gang could not classify him.
Skircle.
Young Jacob in shorts and a t-shirt wearing an outdoorsy hat and clutching a water battle on a towering sand dune in the Gobi Desert. Rolling sand stretches into the background and patches of clear sky and pouring rain clouds move across the windy dome of the sky.
A photo of Mount Erebus by Richard Waitt of the US Geological Survey. The volcano dominates the horizon of Ross Island and overlooks a valley between it and one of the other peaks on the island. The landscape and the mountain are buried in snow and ice but in the foreground igneous rock is available, telling ancient and active history.
“Trump is dumb.” —Stephen King
The last ages of appearance of mammalian megafauna in Brazil are associated with the Pleistocene/Holocene transition, establishing a consensus of extinction of this magnificent fauna during this period of time. In recent decades, direct dating of skeletal remains of this extinct fauna in Argentina, the Caribbean and Alaska, demonstrates that extinctions mammalian megafauna until the middle Holocene. Here, eight fragments of megafauna teeth from the Brazilian Intertropical Region were dated, in the locations of Itapipoca (Ceará state) and the Rio Miranda Valley (Mato Grosso do Sul state), with the respective ages: Itapipoca - Eremotherium laurillardi (PDR-01: age = 6,161 +- 364 RC years BP; PDR-02: age =7,415 +- 167 RC years BP), Smilodon populator (PDR-03: age = 7,803 +- 179 RC years BP), Toxodon platensis (PDR-05: age = 7,804 +- 226 RC years BP), Xenorhinotherium bahiense (PDR-06: age = 3,587 +- 112 RC years BP), Notiomastodon platensis (PDR-07: age = 7,940 +- 502 RC years BP) and Palaeolama major (PDR-09: age = 3,492 +- 165 RC years BP); Miranda River - Eremotherium laurillardi (PDR-11: age = 5,942 +- 294 RC years BP). The ages obtained that the latest ages of megafauna appearance in Brazil are associated with the middle and late Holocene. In South America, the extinction of megafauna has been attributed to many causes, climate/environmental changes or even the synergy between these hypotheses. The ages obtained in this analysis, together with archaeological evidence, demonstrate that the Overkill and Blitzkrieg theories are not plausible explanations for the extinction of the South American megafauna. We believe that the extinction of megafauna in South America is the result of the synergy between environmental/climatic changes between the Last Glacial Maximum and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, with selective hunting of females and young individuals, auto ecological factors of megafauna as supporting agents.
Used napkin on a table with a line of sunlight going across it.
Qing Dynasty depiction of Hou Yi aiming his bow upwards from the work Inquiry of the Heavens.
Colored-pencil drawing of an adult Protoceratops followed by a baby, looking at a bunch of potential ferns to eat.
Statue of Le Marquis de Lafayette in Paris near the Grand Palais.
Eu com o Torre Eiffel.
Me with the Eiffel Tower looming menacingly in the background.
Elephants, hippopotamuses, giraffes, anteaters, gemsboks, an ostrich, and flamingos doing a tower sequences during “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” from The Lion King (1994).
Jean-François Champollion and the Rosetta Stone.
Blue poison dart frog.
Gecko with prosthetic horns and spikes glued to its head playing a baby Tyrannosaurus rex from The Lost World (1960).
Noun settee (plural settees) 1. (UK, Texas) A long seat with a back, made to accommodate several persons at once; a sofa.
Oh No! Trump Negotiates Deal With England And Now They Have The Colonies Back
The flag of the Trucial States. It is a horizontal tricolor with red stripes on the top and the bottom and a white stripe in the middle with a seven-pointed star representing its constituent skeikhdoms.
Mark Witton illustration of several Quetzalcoatlus northropi ground-hunting.
Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).
Map of the Göktürk Khaganate at its height in 576 AD, covering most of the Eurasian Steppe from the Black Sea to Manchuria.
A screenshot from the story of the Instagram page agnes_barketing showing Agnès the miniature dachshund puppy next to the DK Imperial China Definitive Visual History which she has chewed a corner off of.
Agnès in her sheep bed near the radiator while I pet her and wish her good night. The caption says “Good night to the baby.”
Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years Yuki Morono, Motoo Ito, Tatsuhiko Hoshino, Takeshi Terada, Tomoyuki Hori, Minoru Ikehara, Steven D’Hondt & Fumio Inagaki Sparse microbial populations persist from seafloor to basement in the slowly accumulating oxic sediment of the oligotrophic South Pacific Gyre (SPG). The physiological status of these communities, including their substrate metabolism, is previously unconstrained. Here we show that diverse aerobic members of communities in SPG sediments (4.3-101.5 Ma) are capable of readily incorporating carbon and nitrogen substrates and dividing. Most of the 6986 individual cells analyzed with nanometer-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) actively incorporated isotope-labeled substrates. Many cells responded rapidly to incubation conditions, increasing total numbers by 4 orders of magnitude and taking up labeled carbon and nitrogen within 68 days after incubation. The response was generally faster (on average, 3.09 times) for nitrogen incorporation than for carbon incorporation. In contrast, anaerobic microbes were only minimally revived from this oxic sediment. Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 Ma.
Fig. 1. Rock engraving with inscriptions: A. Har ‘Arkov, central Negev Highlands, ibex and dog are patinated to the same degree as the Nabataean inscription (ca. 2000 years old). B. Be’er ‘Ada, southern Negev, extensive patina of dog and ibex petroglyphs indicates they are somewhat older than the Thamudic inscription (ca. 2000 years old). C. Netafim Passage, Eilat region, ibex and dog have the same patina as the transitional Nabataeans-‘Arabic inscriptions (ca. 1500 years old, Avner et al., 2013). D. Har Eldad, Central Negev Highlands, ibex is later than the ‘Arabic inscription, ca. 1000 years old.
A mosaic from Roman Syria made of colorful stone tessae. An elephant, possibly an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), towers over a supine tiger (Panthera tigris). The elephant’s trunk reaches around the tiger and the tiger flails its limbs in a counterattack. The two animals are both impressively muscular.
Agnès the miniature dachshund puppy is on my lap on the couch and she’s staring at me with giant eyes. She has big ears and big paws and is tiny.