Autentico Shakespeare

 - In una città portuale del nord della Francia, presso Calais, è stata casualmente rinvenuta una copia del 'First Folio', la prima lista delle opere del Bardo pubblicata nel 1623, uno dei libri più desiderati esistenti al mondo, pubblicato circa 7 anni dopo la morte di Shakespeare.
Il valore commerciale di un libro intatto del genere (ne esistono altre copie) è compreso tra i 2,5 ed i 5 milioni di euro. 
- La copia francese è mancante delle pagine iniziali e del titolo e dell'intero testo dei "Due gentiluomini di Verona", pertanto la Biblioteca si dovrà accontentare di una valutazione bassa, intorno ai soli 2 milioni: ma come si dice di solito, chi si contenta...


Rare first Shakespeare edition found in 

French library 



A copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio, the first-ever compilation of the Bard's plays published in 1623, has been discovered in the library of an ancient port town in northern 
France.

Remy Cordonnier, librarian in the northern French town of Saint-Omer, carefully shows  on November 25, 2014 a valuable copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio, a collection  of some of his plays dating from 1623 

[Credit: AFP/Denis Charlet] 

One of the world's most valuable and coveted books, the First Folio was uncovered when librarian Remy Cordonnier dusted off a copy of Shakespeare's works dating to the 18th century for an exhibition on English literature in the town of Saint-Omer near Calais. 

"It occurred to me that it could be an unidentified First Folio, with historic importance and great intellectual value," he told AFP. 
The book, published seven years after Shakespeare's death, was authenticated on Saturday by First Folio expert Eric Rasmussen from the University of Nevada. 
Rasmussen, who has written a book about his riveting two-decade hunt to catalogue all 232 existing copies of the book, said the 233rd copy was the first new version unearthed in a decade. 
He told AFP the book was "immediately identifiable" as an original due to its watermarks, the paper used and the fact that errors were still present that would have been corrected in later copies. 
He said the book was missing title pages as well as the whole text of the play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 
"What is really interesting is that it clearly came from the college of Jesuits in Saint-Omer, founded in the late 16th century during Queen Elizabeth's reign when it was illegal for Catholics to go to college," said Rasmussen.

Close- up of The Hamlet.

Remy Cordonnier, librarian in the northern French town of Saint-Omer, carefully shows  a valuable copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio, a collection of some of his  plays dating from 1623, on November 25, 2014 [Credit: AFP/Denis Charlet] 

The book was heavily annotated, with words corrected to more modern versions and with the part of a hostess in Henry IV turned into a male part, with words such as "wench" crossed out and replaced with "fellow". 
He highlighted the "really good survival rate" of an estimated 750 original prints of First Folio. 
The massive book of 36 plays was published at a time when printed plays were not considered literature, and sold for one pound at a time when a skilled worker could perhaps hope to earn four pounds a year, said Rasmussen. 
Rasmussen told AFP his favourite story, which he stumbled upon in his hunt for First Folios, was of the time the Royal Shakespeare Company took their copy to Rome for a papal performance. 
"After they performed they brought it out and the pope was supposed to bless it. He hadn't been adequately briefed so he accepted it as a gift. You can almost see the tug of war going on on stage." 
In Japan, where many copies were snapped up in the 70s and 80s, he once found a copy with a musket bullet piercing it all the way to the tragedy Titus Andronicus. "Somebody had to be holding it up," said Rasmussen, speculating that it may even have saved somebody's life.
 "We find copies that have wine stains on them, that have been left open and have cat prints across them. It humanises them in a way... they are not just priceless artefacts." 

A copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio, a collection of some of his plays  published in 1623 is displayed in the library in the northern French town  of Saint-Omer, November 25, 2014 [Credit: AFP/Denis Charlet] 

Rasmussen said the largest number of First Folios, 82 in total, were snapped up by American Henry Clay Folger and are now housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. 
He explains that the First Folio was the only source for about half of Shakespeare's plays such as Macbeth and Julius Caesar, that had never been published in his lifetime. 
He said people began to "fetishise" the work and in the 19th century it became the must-have collector's item for the super-wealthy. 
In 2006 Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen bought one for $6 million dollars. Saint-Omer library director Francoise Ducroquet said that while most First Folio copies were valued at between 2.5 and five million euros, the damaged version found in her library would probably be worth less. 
However she said the newest discovery would be stored in the library's safe with other precious items. Saint-Omer is an ancient port town that bustled with economic and cultural activity in the Middle Ages.
 Its library has 800 important manuscripts, 230 incunabula -- books printed in Europe before 1501 -- as well as a Gutenberg Bible. 


Authors: Benjamin Massot with Fran Blandy | Source: AFP [November 25, 2014]

Trovata una nuova Statua-Menhir in Francia

Megalithic pillar statue found in southern France

A megalithic pillar statue dating back to the Neolithic period has been found on the banks of Lake Raviège in the Upper Languedoc nature reserve in southern France.

The statue menhir discovered in Lake Raviège [Credit: © F3 MP]

The 2.07 metres tall granite statue, or 'statue-menhir' as it is otherwise called, was excavated in late September in La Salvetat-sur-Agout, Hérault and is in excellent condition.

"This is a beautiful male statue-menhir, fairly standard for most of its attributes, anthropomorphic in design with a sheathed knife," says archaeologist Michel Maille, "however, it has a rather unique face, which is slightly raised and evokes a mask and it's also the first male statue to have a mouth", he added.

Only four of the 150 statue-menhirs found in the region, all female, have mouths and for this reason are often referred to as 'silent deities'.

All date to the Neolithic and Copper Age.

Source: France 3 [November 20, 2013]

Archeologia di genere: chi ha fatto gli stencil delle mani?

L'archeologia di genere non è stata solamente una breve moda: continua la sua strada. Le immagini di mani lasciate per lunghissimi periodi nelle grotte, quasi ovunque, nel mondo sembra fossero fatte - per il 75% - da donne. Esistono altre teorie, naturalmente: e posseggono un'identica plausibilità. Circa il motivo per cui questi 'stencil' fossero fatti, si formulano solamente ipotesi, nessuna certezza.

Prehistoric cave art 

drawn mostly by women

 

says archaeologist

Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma.

Handprints in ancient cave art most often belonged to women, overturning the dogma
that the earliest artists were all men [Credit: Dean Snow/National Geographic]

Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female.

"There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time," said Snow, whose research was supported by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. "People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."

Archaeologists have found hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls across the world. Because many of these early paintings also showcase game animals—bison, reindeer, horses, woolly mammoths—many researchers have proposed that they were made by male hunters, perhaps to chronicle their kills or as some kind of "hunting magic" to improve success of an upcoming hunt. The new study suggests otherwise.

"In most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are," Snow said. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around."

Experts expressed a wide range of opinions about how to interpret Snow's new data, attesting to the many mysteries still surrounding this early art.

"Hand stencils are a truly ironic category of cave art because they appear to be such a clear and obvious connection between us and the people of the Paleolithic," said archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England. "We think we understand them, yet the more you dig into them you realize how superficial our understanding is."

Sex Differences

Snow's study began more than a decade ago when he came across the work of John Manning, a British biologist who had found that men and women differ in the relative lengths of their fingers: Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men's ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.

One day after reading about Manning's studies, Snow pulled a 40-year-old book about cave paintings off his bookshelf. The inside front cover of the book showed a colorful hand stencil from the famous Pech Merle cave in southern France. "I looked at that thing and I thought, man, if Manning knows what he's talking about, then this is almost certainly a female hand," Snow recalled.

Hand stencils and handprints have been found in caves in Argentina, Africa, Borneo, and Australia. But the most famous examples are from the 12,000- to 40,000-year-old cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain.

These hand stencils found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain, were probably made
by a man (left) and a woman (right), respectively [Credit: Roberto Ontanon Peredo,
courtesy Dean Snow/National Geographic]

For the new study, published this week in the journal American Antiquity, Snow examined hundreds of stencils in European caves, but most were too faint or smudged to use in the analysis. The study includes measurements from 32 stencils, including 16 from the cave of El Castillo in Spain, 6 from the caves of Gargas in France, and 5 from Pech Merle.

Snow ran the numbers through an algorithm that he had created based on a reference set of hands from people of European descent who lived near his university. Using several measurements—such as the length of the fingers, the length of the hand, the ratio of ring to index finger, and the ratio of index finger to little finger—the algorithm could predict whether a given handprint was male or female. Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn't especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow's modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy.

Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.

"They fall at the extreme ends, and even beyond the extreme ends," Snow said. "Twenty thousand years ago, men were men and women were women."
Woman, Boy, Shaman?

Snow's analysis determined that 24 of the 32 hands—75 percent—were female.

Some experts are skeptical. Several years ago, evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie performed a similar analysis of Paleolithic handprints. His work—based mostly on differences in the width of the palm and the thumb—found that the vast majority of handprints came from adolescent boys.

For adults, caves would have been dangerous and uninteresting, but young boys would have explored them for adventure, said Guthrie, an emeritus professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "They drew what was on their mind, which is mainly two things: naked women and large, frightening mammals."

Other researchers are more convinced by the new data.

"I think the article is a landmark contribution," said archaeologist Dave Whitley of ASM Affiliates, an archaeological consulting firm in Tehachapi, California. Despite these handprints being discussed for half a decade, "this is the first time anyone's synthesized a good body of evidence."

Whitley rejects Guthrie's idea that this art was made for purely practical reasons related to hunting. His view is that most of the art was made by shamans who went into trances to try to connect with the spirit world. "If you go into one of these caves alone, you start to suffer from sensory deprivation very, very quickly, in 5 to 10 minutes," Whitley said. "It can spin you into an altered state of consciousness."

The new study doesn't discount the shaman theory, Whitley added, because in some hunter-gatherer societies shamans are female or even transgendered.

The new work raises many more questions than it answers. Why would women be the primary artists? Were they creating only the handprints, or the rest of the art as well? Would the hand analysis hold up if the artists weren't human, but Neanderthal?

The question Snow gets most often, though, is why these ancient artists, whoever they were, left handprints at all.

"I have no idea, but a pretty good hypothesis is that this is somebody saying, 'This is mine, I did this,'" he said.

Author: Virginia Hughes | Source: National Geographic [October 08, 2013]

Neanderthal: I primi a lavorare l'osso.

Neanderthals, not modern humans, made first bone tools

One day in 2011, undergraduate student Naomi Martisius was sorting through tiny bone remnants in the University of California, Davis, paleoanthropology lab when she stumbled across a peculiar piece.

From deer rib to tool [Credit: UC Davis]

The bone fragment, from a French archaeological site, turned out to be a part of an early specialized bone tool used by a Neanderthal before the first modern humans appeared in Europe.

"At the time, I had no idea about the impact of my discovery," said Martisius, who is now pursuing her doctoral degree in anthropology at UC Davis.

Martisius' opportunity was the result of a decade of excavation and research by two international teams. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August.

"Previously these types of bone tools have only been associated with modern humans," said Teresa E. Steele, associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis, who also served as a co-author on the article and adviser to Martisius at UC Davis and at archaeological excavations in France.

"However, our identification of these pieces in secure Neanderthal contexts leaves open the possibility that we have found, for the first time, evidence that Neanderthals may have influenced the technology of modern humans," she said.

Used to smooth tough animal hides, the tools were made about 50,000 years ago by Neanderthals -- not just the humans who came after them, as researchers had earlier theorized. The specialized tools are still used today, in similar form, to smooth and refine leather made into high-end purses and jackets.

The bone tools were found in deposits containing typical Neanderthal stone tools and the bones of hunted animals including reindeer, red deer and bison. Three of the four pieces were from the site of Abri Peyrony, France. The animal bones from that site had been exported to UC Davis for analysis in Steele's lab where Martisius worked with her to study the material.

Now in her second year of doctoral studies at UC Davis, Martisius will carry on her research of these pieces. She, Steele and their colleagues will use resources available at UC Davis to conduct experimental studies to manufacture -- and use -- new, similar animal bone tools for comparison.

Using sophisticated imaging techniques, Martisius will examine the pieces made by the Neanderthals, comparing those with the ones first made by the first modern humans in Europe and the ones she manufactures at UC Davis. She said she also will look at animal bones from nearby sites to see if she can identify additional pieces made by Neanderthals.

The tools described in their current work were recovered in archaeological sites in the French countryside that had been explored for more than 100 years, but modern archaeological techniques enabled researchers to recognize these smaller pieces now identified as pieces of once-sophisticated tools, Steele said.

Source: University of California - Davis [September 20, 2013]