Ancient Chinese Chariots
A The Shang Dynasty or Yin Dynasty, according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium. Archaeological work at the Ruins of Yin (near modern-day Anyang), which has been identified as the last Shang capital, uncovered eleven major Yin royal tombs and the foundations of palaces and ritual sites, containing weapons of war and remains from both animal and human sacrifices.
B The Tomb of Fu Hao is an archaeological site at Yinxu, the ruins of the ancient Shang Dynasty capital Yin, within the modern city of Anyang in Henan Province, China. Discovered in 1976, it was identified as the final resting place of the queen and military general Fu Hao. The artifacts unearthed within the grave included jade objects, bone objects, bronze objects, etc. These grave goods are confirmed by the oracle texts, which constitute almost all of the first hand written record we possess of the Shang Dynasty. Below the corpse was a small pit holding the remains of six sacrificial dogs and along the edge lay the skeletons of human slaves, evidence of human sacrifice.
C The Terracotta Army was discovered on 29 March 1974 to the east of Xian in Shaanxi. The terracotta soldiers were accidentally discovered when a group of local farmers was digging a well during a drought around 1.6 km (1 mile) east of the Qin Emperor's tomb at Mount Li (Lishan), a region riddled with underground springs and watercourses. Experts currently place the entire number of soldiers at 8,000 — with 130 chariots (130 cm long), 530 horses and 150 cavalry horses helping to ward off any dangers in the afterlife. In contrast, the burial of Tutankhamun yielded six complete but dismantled chariots of unparalleled richness and sophistication. Each was designed for two people (90 cm long) and had its axle sawn through to enable it to be brought along the narrow corridor into the tomb.
D Excavation of ancient Chinese chariots has confirmed the descriptions of them in the earliest texts. Wheels were constructed from a variety of woods: elm provided the hub, rose-wood the spokes and oak the felloes. The hub was drilled through to form an empty space into which the tampering axle was fitted, the whole being covered with leather to retain lubricating oil. Though the number of spokes varied, a wheel by the fourth century BC usually had eighteen to thirty-two of them. Records show how elaborate was the testing of each completed wheel: flotation and weighing were regarded as the best measures of balance, but even the empty spaces in the assembly were checked with millet grains. One outstanding constructional asset of the ancient Chinese wheel was dishing. Dishing refers to the dish-like shape of an advanced wooden wheel, which looks rather like a flat cone. On occasion they chose to strengthen a dished wheel with a pair of struts running from rim to rim on each of the hub. As these extra supports were inserted separately into the felloes, they would have added even greater strength to the wheel. Leather wrapped up the edge of the wheel aimed to retain bronze.
E Within a millennium, however, Chinese chariot-makers had developed a vehicle with shafts, the precursor of the true carriage or cart. This design did not make its appearance in Europe until the end of the Roman Empire. Because the shafts curved upwards, and the harness pressed against a horse's shoulders, not his neck, the shaft chariot was incredibly efficient. The halberd was also part of chariot standard weaponry. This halberd usually measured well over 3 metres in length, which meant that a chariot warrior wielding it sideways could strike down the charioteer in a passing chariot. The speed of chariot which was tested on the sand was quite fast. At speed these passes were very dangerous for the crews of both chariots.
F The advantages offered by the new chariots were not entirely missed. They could see how there were literally the warring states, whose conflicts lasted down to the Qin unification of China. Qin Shi Huang was buried in the most opulent tomb complex ever constructed in China, a sprawling, city-size collection of underground caverns containing everything the emperor would need for the afterlife. Even a collection of terracotta armies called Terra-Cotta Warriors was buried in it. The ancient Chinese, along with many cultures including ancient Egyptians, believed that items and even people buried with a person could be taken with him to the afterlife.
Roller coaster: the great fairground attraction
How they move
A Like a passenger train, a roller coaster consists of a series of connected cars that move on a track. But unlike a passenger train, it has no engine or power source of its own. For most of the ride, it is moved only by the forces of inertia and gravity. The only exertion of energy occurs at the very beginning of the ride when the coaster train is pulled up the lift hill.
B The traditional lifting mechanism is a long length of chain running up the hill under the track. The chain is fastened in a loop, which is wound around a gear at the top of the hill and another one at the bottom of the hill. The gear at the bottom of the hill is turned by a motor. This turns the chain so that it continually moves up the hill like a long conveyor belt. The coaster cars grip onto the chain, which simply pulls them to the top of the hill.
C At the summit, the train is released and starts its descent. The purpose of this initial ascent is to build up a sort of reservoir of potential energy, which simply means that as the coaster gets higher in the air, there is a greater distance gravity can pull it down.
D As the train starts coasting down the hill, this potential energy is converted into kinetic energy (energy of motion), and the train speeds up. At the bottom of the hill, this has reached its maximum, and this propels the train up the second hill, again building up the potential energy level.
E In this way, the course of the track is constantly converting energy from kinetic to potential and back again. This fluctuation in acceleration is what makes roller coasters so much fun. At its most basic level, this is all a roller coaster is — a machine that uses gravity and inertia to send a train along a winding track.
Coasting through history
F Roller coasters have a long, fascinating history. Their direct ancestors were ice slides, popular in Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. They consisted of a long, steep, wooden slide covered in ice. Riders walked up a ladder or set of stairs to the top of the slide, as high as 21 metres up. At the top, they climbed into sleds made out of wood or blocks of ice and shot down the slope. At the base of the slide, the sleds would crash-land in a sand pile.
G It seems that the idea was then imported into France. For most of the year, the warmer climate would melt the ice, so the French started building waxed slides instead. To help the sleds move down these slides, they added wheels, and in 1817, for the first time, a train was attached to the track. The French continued to expand on this idea, coming up with more complex track layouts, with multiple cars and all sorts of twists and turns.
H The first American roller coaster was built in the mountains of Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s, originally to provide an easy way to send coal to the railway 29 km down the mountain. When the track was first built, a crew at the bottom of the mountain would attach the cart to a team of mules after emptying the load, and the mules would drag it back up to the top. They were eventually replaced with steam engines, to make the system more efficient.
I Soon after these improvements were made, the railway company built a new tunnel that brought the freight trains much closer to the coal mine. Now no longer required for its original purpose, the roller coaster was configured as a 'scenic tour'. For one dollar, tourists got a leisurely ride up to the top of the mountain, followed by a wild, bumpy ride straight down. This was soon a resounding success, attracting thousands of tourists every year.
J Scenic rides like this continued to thrive and were joined by wooden roller coasters similar to the ones we know today. These coasters were the main attraction at popular amusement parks throughout the United States, such as the many parks of Coney Island in New York. By the 1920s, roller coasters were in full swing, with some 2,000 rides in operation around the country. Following the Great Depression, a decline in roller coaster production began in the early 1930s, but a second roller-coaster boom in the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s revitalised the amusement park industry, and introduced a slew of innovative tubular steel coasters.
K This was followed by a decline in interest for the rest of the decade, but since the early 1990s, the amusement-park industry has experienced another coaster boom of sorts. New launching techniques and other technological developments have opened up a world of options for designers, so in some rides you feel as if you are flying. In the next few years we can expect to see many faster, taller and more twisted rides popping up in amusement parks around the world.
Look — Who was talking
Stephen Oppenheimer explores the origins of human speech
A When did we start talking to each other and how long did it take us to become so good at it? One view of language development, held by linguists such as Noam Chomsky and anthropologists such as Richard Klein, is that language, specifically the spoken word, appeared suddenly among modern humans a mere 35,000 to 50,000 years ago and that the ability to speak words and use syntax was recently genetically hard wired into our brains in a kind of language organ. This view of language is associated with the old idea that logical thought is dependent on words, a concept originating with Plato and much in vogue in the 19th century — that is, animals do not speak because they do not think. However, the abstract thought demonstrated in 20th century experiments with chimpanzees and bonobos put this theory in doubt.
B An alternative to the Chomskian theory is that language developed as a series of inventions. This was first suggested by the 18th century philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. He argued that spoken language had developed out of gesture language (langage d'action) and that both were inventions arising initially from the simple association between action and object. The theory sees gesture language as arising originally among apes as sounds accompanying gestures, with these sounds gradually becoming coded into 'words' as the new skill drove its own evolution. Subsequently, coded words developed into deliberate, complex communication. Evolutionary pressures promoted the development of an anatomy geared to speech — the larynx, vocal muscles and a specific part of the brain immediately next to the part responsible for gestures.
C The view that spoken language was ultimately a cultural invention like tool-making, which then drove the biological evolution of the brain and vocal apparatus, seems obvious when you think of the development of different languages. The unique features of a language such as French clearly do not result from any physiological aspect of being French, but are the cultural possessions of the French-speaking community. Each language evolves from one generation to the next, constantly adapting itself to cope with the learning biases of each new set of young, immature minds.
D Those anthropologists and fossil experts who accept that speech started early still tend to think of language evolution as a gradual 2 million year process, with our own modern human species (Homo sapiens) way out at the top. A major reason for this is the perception that brain growth among humans was gradual over a similar period. Several recent changes in the fossil evidence, though, bring this into doubt.
E The first of these is a re-dating of soil layers from the famous Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, where many key fossil remains have been found. A number of big-brained human species appear to be much older than previously thought, with several specimens dating from over a million years ago. When brain sizes for all available skulls are plotted against time using the revised dates, the result is startling; the bulk of increases in brain size was over by around 1.2 million years ago, with some African human species having brain volumes easily within the modern human range by that time.
F So, we have the paradox that over the period when our brain was growing most rapidly, our material cultural development, as measured by stone tools, advanced only marginally; then, over a million years later, when the development of anatomically modern humans finally started to accelerate, artistically and technologically, our brains were actually getting smaller. The additional piece of evidence that makes this paradox all the more significant is that brain size did not just leap between human species in a direct line of ascent towards ourselves. Over the period from 2.5 to 1.5 million years ago, brains were growing more rapidly than at any time since, within all the different human species. The logical conclusion is that there must have been a unique new behaviour driving brain growth, shared between all species of humans.
G So, what was driving rapid brain growth right at the beginning, 2.5 million years ago? The answer may have been staring us in the face. Namely, that not only early humans, but their ancestors, had started the trend in the very useful skill of verbal communication. Around 2.5 million years ago, the weather took a decided turn for the worse, becoming more variable and colder and drier. The search for food became more taxing, and there would have been a real need to communicate more effectively and cope with the worsening environment in a co-operative way. The near maximum in brain size achieved by 1.2 million years ago indicates that those early ancestors could already have been talking perfectly well. Our brain, which had developed to manipulate and organise complex symbolic aspects of speech internally, could now be turned to a variety of other tasks.
H So what happened in the million-year gap after that? Why did we take so long to get to the moon? Cultural evolution aided by communication and teaching is a cumulative interactive process. If each new generation invented just one new skill or idea and passed it on with the rest to their children and cousins, you could predict exactly the same curve of cultural advance as we see from the archaeological and historical record — first very slow, then faster and faster.
