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Antikythera Mechanism

In January of 1900, deep divers off the coast of a Greek island took shelter from a tempest, and found a ii-thou-year-old shipwreck strewn with bones, loot, and a mysterious artifact, half-buried in the sand. Now a team of underwater archaeologists have uncovered a partial skeleton from the aforementioned wreck, in such shockingly good condition that they're going to attempt a Deoxyribonucleic acid extraction on the remains.

Deep diving is dangerous; divers breathe a unlike mix of gases while they're underwater, and nitrogen in their air tanks can cause narcosis, which Jacques Cousteau called the "rapture of the deep." On the beginning exploration of the wreck, which is 150 feet down, when the get-go diver surfaced with reports of bodies and artifacts and fifty-fifty submerged horses, the captain didn't believe a discussion of the story: he idea it was nitrogen narcosis making the diver spin such tales. Just the diver was fine. By 1901, those deep defined had brought to the surface a hoard of cached treasure, including a mysterious clockwork artifact, corroded and crushed, with a gearwheel sticking out of it and markings that nobody understood. They chosen it the Antikythera device, after the island near which it was found. They fished out everything they could get off the bounding main floor, every amphora and coin they could discover, and called it done.

Cousteau heard of the Antikythera device before long afterward the offset publication about information technology, by bespectacled British historian Derek de Solla Toll. Incredibly, the device had just been mothballed in museum storage for half a century considering nobody believed the people of the shipwreck's era could have congenital it. When scientists finally took an involvement and started imaging it, everyone was stunned at the complication of the mechanism. Once Cousteau heard of the device, he himself came to investigate the wreck in the 1970s, and excavated a cached tableau beyond anyone's expectations: dated to the first century BC, Cousteau found statues, jewelry, money, weapons — and several sets of barely recognizable human being remains.

Decades later, we're doing ameliorate with diving tech. The crew doing the underwater digging is breathing something called "trimix," which is a cocktail of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen amend suited to spending time at depth. We've got pressure suits, too, and hyperbaric chambers if something should go incorrect. Nosotros're still sifting through the site and finding buried artifacts, but every detail we detect raises more than questions. The skeleton we just found is no exception. It isn't the only man remains from the Antikythera wreck. It'southward just the best preserved, by a long shot — well plenty and then that Hannes Schroeder and his squad are going to try to get DNA out of it.

Image: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO, via Nature

The jawbone. Epitome: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO, via Nature News

The remains consist of a fractional skull with teeth, two thighbones, 2 arm basic, and some ribs. "Information technology doesn't look like bone that'southward 2,000 years onetime," says Schroeder, an skillful in ancient-DNA analysis who'due south personally working on the DNA extraction. Because the skull is in such great condition, Schroeder can finesse Deoxyribonucleic acid out of the dense bits of os backside the ear called petrous bone; it preserves Dna meliorate than other parts of the skeleton, fifty-fifty the teeth. "It'southward amazing you guys found that," Schroeder says of the partial skull. "If there's any DNA, then from what we know, it'll be there."

DNA from the remains could add together a valuable information indicate to our genetic history and the movement of haplogroups through time. Who was the person these remains came from? Would he (nosotros remember it's a he) take looked "more than Greek-Italian or Near Eastern"?  How volition the Dna we discover inside them modify our understanding of population movements through history? And why, subsequently two k years underwater, are there still so many bones?

To the latter question, in that location exists an respond, fifty-fifty if it'southward a little grim. The wreck site is positioned at the foot of Antikythera'due south steep cliffs. The transport could have been caught in a storm and dashed against the rocks — just the kind of tempest from which those divers originally tried to take shelter. Co-director of the digging team Brandon Foley explains, "We think it was such a tearing wrecking event, people got trapped beneath decks." When the send went down, the wreck was apace buried nether the sand, and and so as well were the bodies.

Based on the richness of debris from the ship, and how they're distributed, researchers think information technology was a large merchant ship with multiple decks, perhaps toting spoils of war looted from Athens or Asia Minor. It could have been inbound as swag for a victory parade for Julius Caesar. In this era, Greek and Roman merchant ships oftentimes carried well-to-do passengers, or at least those who could pay, and sometimes slaves. British underwater archeologist Mark Dunkley points out that a coiffure of a dozen or and then chained-up slaves in the cargo hold would be SOL in a sinking ship. "The crew would be able to get off relatively fast. Those shackled would have no opportunity to escape." The bones just uncovered were surrounded by pieces of corroded fe, still unidentified; the iron oxide has stained the bones bister red.

Equally for the device, scholars and tinkerers take been poring over the fragments of the Antikythera machinery for years, analyzing its function and gearing. Cat scanning and repeated radiographs of the fragments have told us virtually its purpose: the Antikythera device was an orrery, a planetarium that would predict the diurnal movements of the dominicus and the v known planets. It had explicit, detailed instructions on the inside covers: you can just picture show a hoary Grecian geometer yelling "RTFM!" The device could also predict eclipses, and — I'yard non making this upwards — it had bloatware a built-in feature that could as well give the dates of the Greek Olympic games, which happened every iv years.

A device that circuitous, historians concord, probably wasn't the work of a alone innovator. Information technology was a masterwork, hands the most technologically advanced device we've recovered from artifact. It could have been the work of Hipparchus, with his mentor and probably his apprentices. Scientists are using the markings on the device to suss out the latitude at which it was meant to be used.

Schematic of the whole Antikythera mechanism, with pins and gears labeled

Schematic of the whole Antikythera mechanism, with pins and gears labeled. Via Wikipedia

Naturally, there are some enterprising folks who have taken the data from existing studies of the device, often chosen the earth's offset analog reckoner, and done reconstructions trying to observe the answers. The artifact itself is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, several people have done elegant working models, and at that place's even a projection to release CAD files for the device. But its gearing ratios nowadays a trouble: the device appears to have a "fast zone" and a "slow zone" where the gear teeth are differently spaced to account for the varying speed of the planets. The varying gear ratio could be the nuanced awarding of Greek geometrical theory to Babylonian astronomy, and in fact the Greeks were actually into geometry at the time of the wreck, and the inscriptions inside the intricately geared device are thoroughly Babylonian. Or information technology could exist sloppy craftsmanship that made some teeth larger than others. Forensic imaging is our best bet now.

Nobody knows who made the Antikythera device, nor how it came to be on the ship that sank. But if nosotros can narrow down a few lineages, some information on who was where and when — if we tin effigy out who made it and why the gears are spaced the mode they are — the Deoxyribonucleic acid results from that fractional skeleton stand to throw light on the whole affair. It's amazing what you can detect in the data.

Now read: How Dna sequencing works