- There are currently around 60 orcas living in concrete tanks globally.
- Orcas' brain structures and behaviors strongly suggest they are smart, emotional, self-aware beings.
- The study provides compelling evidence that the stresses inherent in captivity do damage to these naturally free-roaming cetaceans.
A study, "The harmful effects of captivity and chronic stress on the well-being of orcas (Orcinus orca)" recently published in Journal of Veterinary Behavior is the product of a unique collaboration of experts in marine mammal science, veterinary science, internal medicine, and psychiatry. It makes the case for a careful consideration of the impacts of chronic stress on captive orcas, at least 60 of whom are currently in captivity. Most have spent years or decades of their lives in these conditions. Around 57 percent of these orcas were born in captivity and 26 of them were captured young. (Orcas are actually the third most commonly confined cetaceans — there are even more bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales held in tanks.)
The study explains how the continual, oppressive stress inherent to a captive orca's life is unhealthy and should be more thoughtfully addressed. Study lead author biopsychologist Lori Marino tells Big Think in an email:
"Our review shows that intelligence, complexity, and awareness are characteristics that make an animal more — not less — vulnerable to the effects of captivity. That seems counterintuitive because a lot of people think that the more mental resources you have the better you are able to cope with various situations. But it is also the case that the more mental capacity you have the greater your needs in order to thrive and the more extreme the impact of living in an artificial environment, that is, an environment outside your adaptive envelope."
While skeptics may consider it a leap to assume that orcas are intelligent and emotional enough to suffer the ill effects of stress, Marino responds, "That would be a claim in search of evidence. Stress is a common phenomenon in all mammals and many other organisms. The effects of chronic stress have been well-studied in mice, rats, dogs, etc." The study provides ample evidence that orcas are exceptionally intelligent, feeling creatures in any event.
The orca brain
Image source: FineShine/Shutterstock
The orca brain exhibits neurobiological traits that are considered prerequisites for complex psychology, emotion, and behavior:
- a large brain size
- an expanded neocortex
- a well-differentiated cortical cytoarchitecture
- an elaborated limbic system
Even more important than sheer brain size is its size in relation to an animal's body. This is captured as the organism's encephalization quotient, or EQ. Says the study, "Odontocetes, and in particular Delphinoidea [the superfamily to which orcas belong], are the most highly encephalized nonhuman taxonomic group known … except modern humans."
Orcas also have the most highly convoluted, or folded, neocortical surface of all mammals including humans, and their ratio of neocortical surface to brain weight also exceeds the human brain's, suggesting an organ well-suited to higher-order functions.
Among a range of other clues presented by the study that suggest orcas are highly intelligent creatures are these:
- Areas associated in the human brain with high-level cognitive and social functions including attention, prediction, social awareness, and empathy are all highly developed in orcas.
- Orcas have a well-integrated mammalian limbic system that supports having emotions, memory, motivation, reasoning, learning, and abstraction.
Supporting behaviors
Image source: Willyam Bradberry /Shutterstock
Observations of orca behavior richly supports the implications of their neurobiological structures. Marino says, "Free-ranging orcas live in tightly-knit social groups that are necessary during their long juvenile periods and afterwards. They support each other, help each other when in trouble, and grieve each other. Mothers and calves are very tightly bonded. In some groups, male orcas stay with their mom their whole life and if mom dies [the male offpsring] may go into a deep depression and die as well. Family and social group are everything."
Orcas also demonstrate culture, with vocalizations and even hunting methods unique within groups and passed from generation to generation.
"Orcas at Punta Norte, Argentina, hunt sea lion and elephant seal pups by beaching themselves and capturing the pups, typically in the surf zone," according to the study.
Captivity morbidities
Image source: Peter Etchells/Shutterstock
In the wild, free-ranging female orcas live an average of 46 years — some live as long as 90 years — and males 31 years, or as long as 50-60 years. Captive orcas rarely live more than 30 years, with many dying in their teens or 20s. Their medical histories can be difficult to access due to facilities' desire for confidentiality. Nonetheless, some morbidities, or causes of death, have become clear over time.
One review from 1979 identified infectious disease as the culprit behind the death of 17 captive North American orcas who'd died since 1965 prior to the report's writing. The new study cites publicly available documentation revealing that between 1971 and 2017, SeaWorld parks alone have experienced 35 documented orca deaths, and that, "When causes of death were available, the most commonly implicated conditions were viral, bacterial and fungal infections, gastrointestinal disease, and trauma."
Infections such as these may not in and of themselves have necessarily been lethal, but when combined with orcas' "weakened immune system, chronic exposure to chemical irritants or trauma to the skin, excessive or improper use of antimicrobials, and an imbalance in the microbiota of the body or environment (which may exist in tanks)," they become deadly. Common fungal infections may also be especially dangerous in this context "as a result of long-term and aggressive antibiotic treatment, overtreatment of water for purity, or both." The same is true for untreated dental infections.
Another frequent cause of orca death: gastrointestinal ulceration — ulcers — caused by prolonged exposure to stress.
The destructive power of stress
Image source: eldeiv/Shutterstock
"Importantly, the poor health and short lifespans of captive orcas are most clearly understood as connected elements in a cycle of maladaptiveness to the conditions of captivity that involves behavioral abnormalities, physical harm and vulnerability to disease."
The paper shows, says Marino, that "when you examine the totality of the welfare findings for captive orcas the whole picture fits best within a larger common framework of evidence on how stress effects captive animals. We know that, when confined, other animals show the same kinds of behavioral and physiological abnormalities that captive orcas do. This is not mysterious or even controversial. It is basic science."
Marino cites as especially damaging the manner in which captivity prevents orcas from making social connections. Tanks also deprive them of places to retreat, making conflicts inescapable even temporarily. Finally, captive orcas are likely to become bored and chronically demotivated by the frustration over their loss of autonomy.
The study also notes physical effects brought on by long-term stress, including:
- the release of too much cortisol by the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis, causing elevated blood sugar, suppression of the immune system, as well as metabolism and blood pressure issues.
- alterations of the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex due to prolonged stress, potentially leading to increased anxiety, post-traumatic stress, cognitive impairment, depression, and mood dysregulation.
- organ degradation in response to unrelenting stress.
- a loss of natural sensory information, about which, says the study, "a growing body of research has found that exposure to excessive or unnatural levels or types of acoustic input can cause a number of impacts to cetaceans, including but not limited to … accelerated aging, suppression of the immune response, as well as premature hearing loss."
A valuable conversation
Marino explains why it was important to conduct this study, saying, "My co-authors and I wrote this review to bring all of the available information on captive orca well-being together in one place and to suggest that we might all best be able to understand the effects of captivity within a very familiar and well-researched model of how chronic stress effects all organisms. We want this paper to be a catalyst for dialogue and further scientific exploration based on data as to how we can better understand who orcas are and how we can identify the important elements needed in a captive environment for them to thrive."
The Whale Sanctuary Project is hosting a free public webinar to discuss the study and the effects of stress on captive orcas with three of the study's authors on Tuesday, July 14.
Black cloak. Scythe. Skeletal grin. The Grim Reaper is the classic visage of death in Western society, but it's far from the only one. Ancient societies personified death in a myriad of ways. Greek mythology has the winged nipper Thanatos. Norse mythology the gloomy and reclusive Hel, while Hindu traditions sport the wildly ornate King Yama.
Modern science has de-personified death, pulling back its cloak to discover a complex pattern of biological and physical processes that separate the living from the dead. But with the advent of these discoveries, in some ways, death has become more alien.
1) You are conscious after death
Many of us imagine death will be like drifting to sleep. Your head gets heavy. Your eyes flutter and gently close. A final breath and then… lights out. It sounds perversely pleasant. Too bad it may not be that quick.
Dr. Sam Parnia, the director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone Medical Center, researches death and has proposed that our consciousness sticks around while we die. This is due to brainwaves firing in the cerebral cortex — the conscious, thinking part of the brain — for roughly 20 seconds after clinical death.
Studies on lab rats have shown their brains surge with activity in the moments after death, resulting in an aroused and hyper-alert state. If such states occur in humans, it may be evidence that the brain maintains a lucid consciousness during death's early stages. It may also explain how patients brought back from the brink can remember events that took place while they were technically dead.
But why study the experience of death if there's no coming back from it?
"In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of 'love,' for instance, we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die," he told LiveScience.
2) Zombie brains are a thing (kind of)
There is life after death if you're a pig...sorta. Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Recently at the Yale School of Medicine, researchers received 32 dead pig brains from a nearby slaughterhouse. No, it wasn't some Mafia-style intimidation tactic. They'd placed the order in the hopes of giving the brains a physiological resurrection.
The researchers connected the brains to an artificial perfusion system called BrainEx. It pumped a solution through them that mimicked blood flow, bringing oxygen and nutrients to the inert tissues.
This system revitalized the brains and kept some of their cells "alive" for as long as 36 hours postmortem. The cells consumed and metabolized sugars. The brains' immune systems even kicked back in. And some samples were even able to carry electrical signals.
Because the researchers weren't aiming for Animal Farm with Zombies, they included chemicals in the solution that prevented neural activity representative of consciousness from taking place.
Their actual goal was to design a technology that will help us study the brain and its cellular functions longer and more thoroughly. With it, we may be able to develop new treatments for brain injuries and neurodegenerative conditions.
3) Death is not the end for part of you
Researchers used zebrafish to gain insights into postmortem gene expression. Image source: ICHD / Flickr
There is life after death. No, science hasn't discovered proof of an afterlife or how much the soul weighs. But our genes keep going after our demise.
A study published in the Royal Society's Open Biology looked at gene expression in dead mice and zebrafish. The researchers were unsure if gene expression diminished gradually or stopped altogether. What they found surprised them. Over a thousand genes became more active after death. In some cases, these spiked expressions lasted for up to four days.
"We didn't anticipate that," Peter Noble, study author and microbiology professor at the University of Washington, told Newsweek. "Can you imagine, 24 hours after [time of death] you take a sample and the transcripts of the genes are actually increasing in abundance? That was a surprise."
Gene expression was shown for stress and immunity responses but also developmental genes. Noble and his co-authors suggest this shows that the body undergoes a "step-wise shutdown," meaning vertebrates die gradually and not all at once.
4) Your energy lives on
Even our genes will eventually fade, and all that we are will become clay. Do you find such oblivion disheartening? You're not alone, but you may take solace in the fact that part of you will continue on long after your death. Your energy.
According to the first law of thermodynamics, the energy that powers all life continues on and can never be destroyed. It is transformed. As comedian and physicist Aaron Freeman explains in his "Eulogy from a Physicist":
"You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got."
5) Near-death experiences may be extreme dreams
Near-death experiences come in a variety of styles. Some people float above their bodies. Some go to a supernatural realm and meet passed-on relatives. Others enjoy the classic dark-tunnel-bright-light scenario. One thing they all have in common: We don't know what's going on.
A study published in Neurology suggests near-death experiences stem from a type of sleep-wake state. It compared survivors who had near-death experiences with those who did not. The researchers found that people with near-death experiences were more likely to also undergo REM intrusions, states in which sleep intrudes upon wakeful consciousness.
"People who have near-death experiences may have an arousal system that predisposes them to REM intrusion," Kevin Nelson, professor at the University of Kentucky and the study's lead author, told the BBC.
It's worth noting that the study does have its limitations. Only 55 participants were interviewed in each group, and the results relied on anecdotal evidence. These highlight key difficulties in studying near-death experiences. Such experiences are rare and cannot be induced in a controlled setting. (Such a proposal would be a huge red flag for any ethics board.)
The result is sparse data opened to a lot of interpretation, but it is unlikely that the soul enjoys a postmortem romp. One experiment installed pictures on high shelves in 1,000 hospital rooms. These images would only be visible to people whose souls departed the body and returned.
No cardiac arrest survivor reported seeing the images. Then again, if they did manage to sever their fleshy fetters, they may have had more pressing matters to attend to.
6) Animals may mourn the dead too
Elephants form strong familial bonds, and some eye witness accounts suggest they may mourn the dead, too. Image source: Cocoparisienne / Pixabay
We're still not sure, but eye witness accounts suggest the answer may be yes.
Field researchers have witnessed elephants staying with the dead — even if the deceased is not from the same family herd. This observation led the researchers to conclude the elephants had a "generalized response" to death. Dolphins too have been seen guarding deceased members of their species. And chimpanzees maintain social routines with the dead, such as grooming.
No other species has been observed performing human-like memorial rituals, which requires abstract thought, but these events suggest animals possess a unique understanding of and response to death.
As Jason Goldman writes for BBC, "[F]or every facet of life that is unique to our species, there are hundreds that are shared with other animals. As important as it is to avoid projecting our own feelings onto animals, we also need to remember that we are, in an inescapable way, animals ourselves."
7) Who first buried the dead?
Anthropologist Donald Brown has studied human cultures and discovered hundreds of features shared by each and every one. Among them, every culture has its own way to honor and mourn the dead.
But who was the first? Humans or another hominin in our ancestral lineage? That answer is difficult because it is shrouded in the fog of our prehistorical past. However, we do have a candidate: Homo naledi.
Several fossils of this extinct hominin were discovered in a cave chamber at the Rising Star Cave system, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. To access the chamber required a vertical climb, a few tight fits, and much crawling.
This led researchers to believe it unlikely so many individuals ended up there by accident. They also ruled out geological traps like cave-ins. Given the seemingly deliberate placement, some have concluded the chamber served as a Homo naledi graveyard. Others aren't so sure, and more evidence is needed before we can definitively answer this question.
8) Walking corpse syndrome
The medieval Danse Macabre fresco at the Holy Trinity Church in Hrastovlje, Solvenia. (Photo: Marco Almbauer/Wikimedia Commons)
For most of us, the line between life and death is stark. We are alive; therefore, we are not dead. It's a notion many take for granted, and we should be thankful we can manage it so effortlessly.
People afflicted with Cotard's syndrome don't see the divide so cleanly. This rare condition was first described by Dr. Jules Cotard in 1882 and describes people who believe they are dead, missing body parts, or have lost their soul. This nihilistic delusion manifests in a prevailing sense of hopelessness, neglect of health, and difficulty dealing with external reality.
In one case, a 53-year-old Filipino woman with Cotard's syndrome believed herself to smell like rotting fish and wished to be brought to the morgue so she could be with her kind. Thankfully, a regimen of antipsychotics and antidepressants improved her condition. Others with this debilitating mental disorder have also been known to improve with proper treatment.
9) Do hair and fingernails grow after death?
Nope. This is a myth, but one that does have a biological origin.
The reason hair and fingernails don't grow after death is because new cells can't be produced. Glucose fuels cell division, and cells require oxygen to break down glucose into cellular energy. Death puts an end to the body's ability to intake either one.
It also ends the intaking of water, leading to dehydration. As a corpse's skin desiccates, it pulls away from the fingernails (making them look longer) and retracts around the face (giving a dead man's chin a five-o'clock shadow). Anyone unlucky enough to exhume a corpse could easily mistake these changes as signs of growth.
Interestingly, postmortem hair and fingernail growth provoked lore about vampires and other creatures of the night. When our ancestors dug up fresh corpses and found hair growth and blood spots around mouths (the result of natural blood pooling), their minds naturally wandered to undeath.
Not that becoming undead is anything we need to worry about today. (Unless, of course, you donate your brain to the Yale School of Medicine.)
10) Why we die?
People who live to be 110 years old, called super-centenarians, are a rare breed. Those who live to be 120 rarer still. The longest-living human on record was Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who lived an astounding 122 years.
But why do we die in the first place? Setting spiritual and existential responses aside, the simple answer is that nature is done with us after a certain point.
Success in life, evolutionarily speaking, is passing on one's genes to offspring. As such, most species die soon after their fecund days end. Salmon die soon after making their upriver trek to fertilize their eggs. For them, reproduction is a one-way trip.
Humans are a bit different. We invest heavily in our young, so we require a longer lifespan to continue parental care. But human lives outpace their fecundity by many years. This extended lifespan allows us to invest time, care, and resources in grandchildren (who share our genes). This is known as the grandmother effect.
But if grandparents are so useful, why is cap set at 100-some-odd years? Because our evolution did not invest in longevity beyond that. Nerve cells do not replicate, brains shrink, hearts weaken, and we die. If evolution needed us to hang around longer, maybe these kill switches would have been weeded out, but evolution as we know it requires death to promote adaptive life.
At this age, however, it is likely that our children may be entering their grandparent years themselves, and our genes will continue to be cared for in subsequent generations.
Dawn's last look at the asteroid Vesta
The asteroid Vesta is the second largest asteroid in the solar system's asteroid belt, with a diameter of about 330 miles. (Ceres is the biggest.) It is the brightest asteroid up there, too, sometimes visible to the naked eye from Earth. Astronomers consider it a planetesimal because, like a mini-Earth, it has an iron core and rock in its crust and mantle.
The asteroid has long been an object of interest to star-gazers. The first book Isaac Asimov published was called Marooned off Vesta, and in 2011, the NASA spacecraft Dawn paid it a visit on its way to Ceres.
Dawn found two massive impact craters on Vesta — Rheasilvia and Veneneia — evidence of collisions large enough that they ejected about one percent of Vesta out into space. Indeed, roughly six percent of the meteorites we have found on Earth come from Vesta. Dawn also observed that there are two enormous troughs roughly around Rheasilvia and Veneneia. It has been assumed that they are somehow related to the two giant impacts.
A new study revisits this assumption and proposes a novel hypothesis about what exactly these mysterious troughs are.
Counting craters
Vesta's topography, color-enhanced, from Dawn.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI
If the troughs were produced by the Rheasilvia and Veneneia impacts, then they must be roughly the same age as the craters. Counting craters is one way to determine age.
"Our work used crater-counting methods to explore the relative age of the basins and troughs," says co-author Jupiter Cheng. Since a newly formed body is free of impact craters, one can estimate its age by counting the number of craters present. While this is obviously an imprecise way of figuring out the absolute age of an asteroid, it is useful for determining the relative age of specific features. If the features are surrounded by a similar number of impacts, they are probably roughly the same age.
"Our result," says Cheng, "shows that the troughs and basins have a similar number of the crater of various sizes [sic], indicating they share a similar age. However, the uncertainties associated with the crater counts allow for the troughs to have formed well after the impacts."
This timeline fits with the researcher's proposed explanation for the troughs.
Low gravity and the troughs
Credit: University of Georgia / NASA / JPL
It has been assumed, says Cheng, that the "troughs are fault-bounded valleys with a distinct scarp on each side that together mark the down-drop (sliding) of a block of rock."
However, there is a problem with this theory. It is based on the way rocks and debris behave under the force of gravity on Earth; Vesta's gravitational pull is far less. Indeed, Dawn found Vesta's gravity consistent with an iron core having a 140-mile diameter; the Earth's, by comparison, is about 2,165 miles in diameter.
Cheng notes that "rock can also crack apart and form such troughs, an origin that has not been considered before. Our calculations also show that Vesta's gravity is not enough to induce surrounding stresses favorable for sliding to occur at shallow depths. Instead, the physics shows that rocks there are favored to crack apart."
Cheng summarizes, "Taken all together, the overall project provides alternatives to the previously proposed trough origin and geological history of Vesta, results that are also important for understanding similar landforms on other small planetary bodies elsewhere in the solar system."
So while still consistent with the prevailing theory that the impacts resulted in the troughs, the researchers suggest that they did not cause landslides on Vesta. The impacts cracked it.
The Saint-Bélec slab in full.
Thousands of prehistoric monuments dot the landscape of Brittany, including this megalithic tomb in Carnac. A locally discovered Bronze Age map may be the oldest of its kind in Europe.Credit: Damien Meyer via AFP / Getty Images
It's about 4,000 years ago, and you are the ruler of a prosperous little Bronze Age kingdom at the end of the world. To celebrate your success, you commission a map of your bountiful domain: a stone slab 2.2 m by 1.53 m (6.5 ft by 5 ft), representing an area of 30 km by 21 km (19 mi by 13 mi). But all good things come to an end. You, or one of your successors, is buried with the slab — broken to indicate the overthrow of your dynasty.
You have the last laugh, though. Your name and that of your little empire have been forgotten, but that slab is now recognized as Europe's oldest map that can be matched to a territory — even if it took the supposedly clever scientists of the distant future more than a century to figure that out.
In a nutshell, that is the story of the Saint-Bélec slab. In 1900, local archaeologist Paul du Châtellier retrieved it from a prehistoric burial mound in Finistère, the French department on the western edge of Brittany. (Its name means "end of the world.")
Waiting for a Champollion
After unceremoniously gluing the pieces of the broken stone back together with concrete, Du Châtellier faithfully reproduced the markings on its surface for a report, in which he noted: "Some see a human form, others an animal one. Let's not let our imagination get the better of us and let us wait for a Champollion [the Egyptologist who in 1822 deciphered the hieroglyphics, Ed.] to tell us what it says."
Drawing of the Saint-Bélec slab by Paul du Châtellier (1901).Credit: Bibliothèque Nationale de France / Public domain
Du Châtellier had the stone, weighing more than a ton, moved to his ancestral home, Château de Kernuz, where he maintained a private museum. The slab was placed in a niche near the moat of the castle. After the amateur prehistorian's death in 1911, his artifacts were acquired by France's National Archeological Museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye but remained on site.
The stone languished in obscurity for decades. In 1994, researchers revisiting Du Châtellier's original drawing found that the intricate markings on the stone looked a lot like a map. The stone itself, however, had gone missing. It was "rediscovered" in the castle cellar only in 2014.
From 2017 to earlier this year, researchers from INRAP (France's National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research) and other institutions carried out extensive research on the slab. Their conclusion was published in March 2021 in the Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française.
And it is spectacular: this is the earliest known example in Europe of a map for which we can identify the territory it depicts. The slab was engraved in the early Bronze Age (2150-1600 BC), which makes it contemporaneous with the Nebra Sky Disk, a map of the cosmos discovered in Germany (but not conclusively identified with any particular constellations).
A map with 80 percent accuracy
Another famous prehistoric map, from Bedolina in Valcamonica (northern Italy), is dated later, to the Iron Age. The landscape it depicts has not been identified; possibly it is a purely imagined one.
Close-up of the territory depicted on the Saint-Bélec map. In yellow: two possible locations for the royal enclosure; in red: Roman road (upgrade of an older pathway); black square: tomb burial; black circle: burial mound. Credit: IGN, Fily 2008, DRAC/SRA Bretagne, DAO, C. Nicolas via INRAP.
The Saint-Bélec slab is the first map of its kind and age that has been identified with a particular territory. The researchers found that the markings on the slab corresponded to the landscape of the Odet Valley, oriented east-north-east to west-south-west. Using geolocation technology, the researchers established that the territory represented on the slab bears an 80 percent accurate resemblance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet river.
The map is centered on the present-day municipality of Roudouallec, in the neighboring department of Morbihan, but also includes the location of the burial mound in which it was found, more to the west in Leuhan, as well as the foothills of the Montagnes noires ("Black Mountains").
The surface of the slab had been worked to represent the terrain's undulations — also making it Europe's oldest 3D map. Lines correspond to river tributaries. Various other markings (circles, squares) are thought to represent parcelled fields, settlements, and/or burial mounds and perhaps the ancient road from Tronoën to Trégueux. A circular symbol near the source of the Odet (and those of two other rivers, the Isole and the Stêr Laër) may represent the local ruler's residence.
Rise and fall of Bronze Age kingdoms
Map of "royal" Bronze Age tombs in Brittany with theoretical boundaries between their domains. Slab location marks the area depicted by the Saint-Bélec map.Credit: IGN, Fily 2008, DRAC/SRA Bretagne, DAO, C. Nicolas via INRAP.
The early Bronze Age was the time when the first primitive states emerged in western Europe and along with them a network of commercial, cultural, and diplomatic exchanges. This was an interconnected world, and the sea that surrounds Brittany on three sides was a passageway, not a border. In local Breton graves of that time, objects have been found that originated in southern England and northern Spain.
The study speculates that the map might have been made as an expression of political power. But prestige need not have been the only reason. The map may also have served as a land register, to keep track of who did what where — and how much they owed in tax as a consequence.
Whichever purpose it served, the slab may have been in use for centuries, before it was placed in a grave and broken in situ — perhaps a deliberate act of iconoclasm, to indicate the end of the unnamed Bronze Age kingdom. Perhaps the broken map is even an echo of a wider societal change: the end of the Bronze Age kings altogether. After all, it would not be France without the occasional revolution.
The original article: La carte et le territoire : la dalle gravée du Bronze ancien de Saint-Bélec (Leuhan, Finistère) can be previewed and purchased from the Société Préhistorique Française.
For more background see this interview with researchers Yvan Pailler and Clément Nicolas at INRAP (in French).
Strange Maps #1105
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
