How much can the written records of ancient civilizations tell us about the animals they lived alongside? Published in Environmental Archaeology, Our latest research, based on the venomous snakes described in an ancient Egyptian papyrus, suggests more than you might think.
Many snakes were probably much more widespread in ancient Egypt. Composite image. Credit: Mamba: W. Wüster. Pyramids: Ricardo Liberato, CC BY-SA 2.0. Montage: W. Wüster, based on the venomous snakes described in an ancient Egyptian papyrus, suggests more than you might think.
Niche modeling reconstructs the conditions in which a species lives, and identifies parts of the planet that offer similar conditions. Once the model has been taught to recognize places that are suitable today, we can add in maps of past climate conditions. It then produces a map showing all the places where that species might have been able to live in the past.Our study shows the much more humid climates of early ancient Egypt would have supported many snakes that don't live there today.
Similarly, one entry of the Brooklyn Papyrus describes a snake"patterned like a quail" that"hisses like a goldsmith's bellows." The puff adder would fit this description, but currently lives only south of Khartoum in Sudan and in northern Eritrea. Again, our models suggest that this species' range would once have extended much further north., but perhaps not uniformly.
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See gorgeous ancient Egyptian 'mummy portraits' from nearly 2 millennia agoLaura is the archaeology and Life's Little Mysteries editor at Live Science. She also reports on general science, including paleontology. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research.
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