For those seeking life on Mars, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Nearly 35 years after NASA’s twin Viking robots eased down onto its ruddy surface, there is still no incontrovertible evidence that living organisms ever existed on the fourth planet from the sun. Few researchers accept one scientist’s claims that the 1976 Viking experiment detected life. The brief frenzy over possible fossils in a Mars meteorite has fizzled. And even after billions of dollars’ worth of adorable rovers and eagle-eyed orbiters have prodded and probed the planet, the results have been at best ambiguous and at times downright confusing.

Yet a growing number of space scientists are upbeat, even buoyant, about the likelihood that Mars is a living world. “A variety of discoveries are creating a kind of buzz,” says Chris McKay, an astrogeophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “And people seem more enthusiastic. It’s group psychology.” There has been no single major breakthrough in the search, but a subtle change is taking place within the clubby community dedicated to finding and bringing back organisms—dead or alive—from the Red Planet.

It is not now considered a stupid idea to look for life on Mars,” says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “In recent years the case has been made again and again that life is or was possible there.” Undergirding this new optimism are reams of data—from Earth-based telescopes as well as Mars orbiters, landers, and rovers—that have slowly painted a much more complete and complicated picture of the Mars environment stretching back billions of years, providing intriguing hints that microbes might have once evolved there, and might yet endure.

For younger researchers who were children when Viking landed, it is hard to conceive of a solar system where Earth is the only life-bearing place. They take it for granted that organisms can endure extreme environments. Weird and wonderful forms of life have been found deep within the Earth’s crust, swimming in boiling pools, and clinging to vents deep under the ocean surface. That versatility heartens those looking beyond our own planet. “If it smells like life and looks like life, then it could be life,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a 46-yearold astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman. “There’s a strong sense that we should get missions going to nail this down. I’d be surprised if Mars were sterile.”

That assessment would have raised eyebrows 10 years ago, but it is no longer outside the mainstream. Even William Schopf senses a shift in attitude. The UCLA paleobiologist was the house skeptic at NASA’s 1996 press conference introducing the Mars meteorite and its alleged fossils of microbes. While he remains skeptical, Schopf believes that if biology ever took hold on Mars, it is probably still there. “If we’ve learned one thing in recent years,” he says, “it is that life is resilient.”

No one knows that better than John Baross, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. A very resilient life form nearly killed him. When the bacteria attacked, his body turned as red as a fireplug as his temperature climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. In eight days he lost 38 pounds as the invader released a toxin that ate away at the muscles in his legs and back. While doctors frantically pumped his bloodstream full of antibiotics, the organism hid behind a thin protective skin of sugary slime that made it impervious to the medicine.

Baross at the time happened to be studying just such slime, known as a biofilm. His graduate students sent the hospital extensive information on the bacterium and its protective cloak to share with the puzzled physicians. “We knew more about it than they did,” Baross recalls wryly. Finally, an exhaustive battery of tests pinpointed the invader’s primary location: the liver. Doctors were then able to tailor the meds to overwhelm it. Even so, it took Baross seven painful months to recover.

Baross’s personal encounter with the bacteria deepened his belief that such biofilms might extend from the bottom of the ocean into interplanetary space. Two thousand feet below the sea, in the cracks of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, he and his students recently discovered single-celled organisms flourishing in highly alkaline water close to the boiling point. The gooey film encasing these organisms is the key to their survival.

Such sticky mucilage is among the oldest of known organisms, dating back more than 3 billion years. And Baross’s lab work shows that the mid- Atlantic biofilms have an astonishing capacity for transferring genes. That facility may have been just what early life needed to give rise to the widely varied genomes that walk, swim, and fly on Earth today.

Other researchers are busy scouring our planet to test the limits to organic life. They have found Cephalosporium (fungi that live in highly acidic environments), Euglena and Chlorella (algae that grow in heavy metals), and a cockroach that can survive massive doses of gamma radiation. Some archaea—a domain of microbial life that was little understood when the Viking landers reached their destination—live in even more extreme situations, flourishing in temperatures far above the boiling point of water and surviving in thick brine.

The many extreme-life discoveries led NASA to ask the National Academy of Sciences for help in knowing what to search for beyond our planet. Baross chaired the investigating committee. The group reported that carbon-based life dependent on liquid water and using DNA “is not the only way to create phenomena that would be recognized as life.” Quickly dubbed the “weird life report,” the study dramatically concluded that many locales in the solar system could support life drawing on a variety of liquids and energy sources. “I think life existed on Mars,” Baross says. And if it did, he—like Schopf— thinks that it, or evidence of it, is probably still there.

Life’s resilience and the sheer diversity of terrestrial organisms were not obvious on July 20, 1976, when the first Viking lander touched down on Mars’s Chryse Planitia lowlands, programmed to find life as we then knew it. At the time, that meant looking for water, warmth, and the right nutrients for delicate organisms. Scientists didn’t dream that life could flourish in brine pockets of sea ice or in mine water filled with heavy metals. “In hindsight, what we did with Viking was incredibly naive,” Jakosky says. “We have since learned that life can be exceedingly difficult to detect.”

And yet one man insists that the Viking search yielded a positive result. “In my mind the question is resolved,” says Gilbert Levin, the leader of one of the Viking experiments, the Labeled Release Life Detection Experiment. Ever since the data came in from Viking, he has argued that his tests gave evidence consistent with life on Mars; now, after further analysis, he believes they prove its existence. His colleagues have responded with doubt, even derision, over the years. But growing knowledge about extremophiles on Earth and the environment on Mars has given Levin, who just turned 86, hope that his assertion will finally be taken seriously.

Levin’s recipe for smoking out Martian life was elegantly simple: Scoop up Martian dirt with the Viking arm, seal it in a chamber, add an organic compound with a trace of radioactive carbon, and wait. Any bacteria similar to those on Earth would exhale radioactive gas. Next, take a second sample and subject it to high heat to kill off any microorganisms, then add more radioactive compounds to the chamber. If there is no subsequent radioactive release, that demonstrates that there are living microbes on Mars.

Indeed, the chambers on both Viking landers signaled a radioactive reading in the first round followed by none in the second. Levin celebrated with champagne and cigars. But within days that finding was contradicted by results from the gas chromatograph spectrometer, which detected no sign of organic compounds, much less evidence of life. And without organic compounds— molecular combinations of carbon and hydrogen—life as we know it is not imaginable.

Scientists assumed that a nonbiological reaction had caused Levin’s instruments to register life, and the lack of organics seemed to seal the deal. NASA lost interest in what seemed a quixotic quest, and Mars exploration was abandoned. “And from then until now, the gospel is that Mars doesn’t have any organics in its soil,” McKay says. The irony is that we now know such compounds litter the solar system, present everywhere from Saturn’s moon Titan to common meteorites; organics are probably present even on Mars’s little moons, Phobos and Deimos.

In 2008 the NASA Phoenix lander added fuel—literally—to the debate. The robot detected perchlorates, charged particles consisting of a single chlorine atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms, in the arctic soil taken from near the planet’s north pole. That molecule helped Phoenix get to Mars in the first place, since perchlorate is a powerful rocket fuel. Some researchers took the presence of perchlorate as another sign that life on Mars’s surface is unlikely, since the compound is a powerful oxidizer, acting like a bleach at high temperatures.

But McKay believes the find is an exciting hint of life’s presence. “This is the most important discovery since Viking,” he contends. “This made our whole world change.” In his reading, the Viking gas chromatograph scooped up soil, heated it, and in so doing activated the perchlorate, which then destroyed the very organics the spacecraft was searching for. Only a single type of molecule, which could have been produced by the perchlorate reacting with organics, appeared in each sample. “The results were misinterpreted,” McKay says. “And our whole community is in denial.”

Schulze-Makuch agrees, saying the Viking gas chromatograph lacked sensitivity; it also failed to register life when a version of the device on Earth was fed a sample from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, a seemingly barren place that actually hosts some microorganisms. He adds that perchlorates could serve as a potent energy source as well as a way for life to access water. In the Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the world’s most desiccated spots, perchlorate in the soil can condense water out of the atmosphere. Intriguingly, small droplets—which appeared to be water—were spotted in photos on the legs of the Phoenix lander.

Micrograph of a Mars meteorite on Earth; the rim of Concepcion, a young Martian crater; Viking 2 gathering Mars soil for analysis

So while some researchers see the perchlorate find as another sign of life’s unlikelihood on Mars, Schulze-Makuch is positively elated. “From an extremophile perspective, this story is a plus for life,” he says. For example, instead of using a water-based substance as a basis for its cellular processes, a Martian organism might use hydrogen peroxide, a molecule similar to perchlorate that is abundant on Mars. The debate may finally be resolved when NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory arrives in the autumn of 2012. “Our great hope is that we will find organics either in the soil or inside rocks” drilled by the robot, McKay says.

The renewed possibility of organics on Mars has led researchers to reconsider the conclusions of Levin. “The community is not convinced he’s right, but he’s a first-rate scientist, and you can’t just dismiss what he says,” Jakosky notes. At UCLA, Schopf argues that laboratory tests long ago showed how nonbiological soil chemistry could have produce the results seen on Viking. But he admits that the mainstream view could prove false. “Levin isn’t necessarily wrong,” he says. “There are lots of examples of people who stick to their guns and are proved right —think of Alfred Wegener and continental drift.”

Like Levin, the team that claims it found evidence of life in a Mars rock dubbed Allan Hills 84001 remains unbowed in the face of widespread scientific skepticism. That rock was blasted off the surface of the Red Planet millions of years ago and fell to Earth as a meteorite landing in Antarctica. At its famous 1996 press conference, a group from NASA Johnson Space Center led by David McKay—no relation to Chris—laid out four lines of chemical and physical evidence that they believed made a strong case for life on Mars.

After years of further analysis and debate, many astrobiologists think that three of those four can be shown to be the result of nonliving chemical or geological activity. The fourth line is tenuous but more intriguing. The meteorite is full of grains of an iron oxide mineral called magnetite, each grain a mere 20 to 120 nanometers across. On Earth, organisms called magnetotactic bacteria routinely manufacture such tiny crystals. But in 2003 two papers noted that there are other ways to make magnetite crystals, such as slamming a rock from space onto the Martian surface. The intense heat could degrade carbonates and form similar structures.

In November 2009 the McKay team struck back with a new paper. Using advanced microscopy, they noted that the crystals in the Allan Hills sample are too pure to be explained by a thermal event. “We do not believe it is too incautious to restate our original hypothesis that such magnetites constitute strong evidence of early life on Mars,” said lead author Kathie Thomas-Keprta at the time. A member of the original Allan Hills team, she insists that there is no longer an alternative to the existence of life in the formation of the crystals. “We’re left with only one hypothesis standing,” she says. Her next step is to find corroborating evidence in other meteorites.

 

Baross argues that if Earthlike life-forms created these crystals, they would have to be highly sophisticated organisms. Given the harsh environment, he finds it unlikely that any Mars life evolved far beyond simple biofilms. Other researchers say that any number of chemical processes might be responsible. “It’s almost a fool’s errand,” Jakosky says. “You could spend the rest of your life altering formulas to show what can or cannot make magnetite.”

 

Baross argues that if Earthlike life-forms created these crystals, they would have to be highly sophisticated organisms. Given the harsh environment, he finds it unlikely that any Mars life evolved far beyond simple biofilms. Other researchers say that any number of chemical processes might be responsible. “It’s almost a fool’s errand,” Jakosky says. “You could spend the rest of your life altering formulas to show what can or cannot make magnetite.”

Thomas-Keprta believes the data and the momentum are on her side. “As a group, scientists now consider Mars to have once been habitable, and it may still be so,” she says. “We’re a long way from the dry and desiccated deserts of the past. Mars could have supported a biosphere.”

Some researchers believe the mere presence on Earth of a meteorite from its distant neighbor underscores the possibility that life has been transferred from planet to planet.

Perhaps the most intriguing sign of life since the Allan Hills announcement was the detection of methane in the thin Martian atmosphere. The discovery by a number of research teams did not grab headlines around the world as the Mars rock did, but it may prove more important in the quest to find life. On Earth, methane is emitted by two sources: living creatures, such as cows, and geological formations, such as mud volcanoes. So the methane on Mars may be the result of geological activity or life—or both.

Methane on Mars may be the result of geological activity or life—or both.

Last year, using groundbased telescopes, a team led by Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reported that Mars’s methane is concentrated in vast plumes. The team charted the spread of several plumes across the northern hemisphere as summer approached and noted that they seemed to originate above volcanic regions. One plume expanded to include more detecthan 20,000 tons of methane, comparable to the output of the Santa Barbara seep, one of the largest geological methane sources on Earth.

There is no doubt Mars once rumbled and spewed. The planet is home to the solar system’s largest volcano, Olympus Mons, which is as tall as three Mount Everests. But geologists have found little evidence of activity in recent eons; the newest volcanic deposits date back millions of years. Besides, volcanoes typically give off not just methane but a host of other gases, and those have not been detected.

Mumma says he stands by his data. But some scientists— Chris McKay, for example—see it as highly unlikely that the Red Planet is active enough to produce methane and believe there is no explanation for its high rate of dissipation in the atmosphere. “I’m forced to conclude that the methane data are probably wrong,” McKay says.

Baross, however, is excited by the possibility that the methane results from a chemical process called serpentinization, which can provide a rich environment for life. “It’s a driving force for recycling nutrients in the Earth system,” he says. Cold water reacts with oxidants to crack rock, producing heat and a host of mineral compounds. “It’s a really dynamic process, and if it is going on on Mars, then you may be circulating a lot of liquid water through rock.” That is a purely chemical process, but it is the same one that led to the growth of slimy organisms along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Back on Mars, NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers have found evidence of minerals associated with serpentinization.

The topsoil of Mars is probably dead, due to the intense radiation and extreme temperatures (–195° to 70°F), but the prospects for life look much better below the surface. Baross wants a mission that drills below the places Mumma has pinpointed as methane sources, and that goes far deeper than the drilling planned for future missions. He envisions a sophisticated robot that could do the equivalent of deep-sea drilling, boring down hundreds of meters. Only then, he believes, can scientists answer the heady question of life on Mars.

For most life seekers, the ultimate goal is getting a few pounds of Martian rock back to a lab on Earth. “What we need is a sample return,” Jakosky says. NASA and ESA currently envision a joint mission to bring back the Martian goods around the middle of the next decade. But the cost—possibly $8 billion— makes that a tough sell in the current economic climate. Baross is also wary of grabbing a few rocks and repeating Viking’s legacy of ambiguous, yet-to-be-understood results.

In the meantime, Jakosky’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe is slated to arrive in 2013, two years after the Mars Science Laboratory. If all goes as planned, joint European- U.S. projects will yield an orbiter ready for launch in 2016 and two rovers in 2018. None of these probes is likely to find the direct evidence of life that will settle the debate, though. “My guess is that skepticism will remain in the science community almost regardless of what is found,” Schopf predicts. “That’s not to say the missions won’t lead us in the right direction.”

A slow, steady pace is just what is needed, NASA managers insist. “The key is to do careful, long-range homework,” says Michael Meyer, lead scientist of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. Gathering more detailed data on surface chemistry, the history of liquid water, climate cycles, and the exact constituents of the atmosphere are critical to building a case for—or against—life.

That approach may seem conservative to some, but it takes into account the hardlearned lessons of Viking. And it will provide the foundation for the extraordinary evidence required to support the most extraordinary of claims. “This could lead to the most stupendous discovery in the history of human existence,” Schopf says, speaking with the practiced patience of a scientist. “Little steps add up.”

 

The sobering message from an extraordinary ancient Syrian settlement: Urban civilization and organized warfare emerged hand in hand.

Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. “Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”

More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.

The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today’s Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means “hill”) offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.

Like hundreds of other mounds in this region, Brak was built up over millennia as homeowners knocked down their decaying mudbrick houses and erected new structures on top of the remains. This tell towers over all others in the region, rising about 130 feet above the plain. The site contains a mini–mountain range of eroded hills and valleys covering more than 120 acres, surrounded by a sprawl of smaller mounds circling the central core like satellites. People lived here for at least 3,000 years, and probably much longer. Brak was abandoned around 1200 B.C. during the chaotic time when the Hittite empire collapsed and the Bronze Age ended.

The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in the conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.

“There was a big party of people feasting,” says Oates matter-of-factly, passing cookies around the table during afternoon tea in Brak’s cramped mud-brick dining hall.

At first glance, Oates seems an unlikely figure to revolutionize our understanding of the ancient world. She spent most of her middle years raising three children while assisting her husband, David, who directed excavations in Iraq and Syria for several decades. A self-described “dutiful wife,” Oates says she was left to draw potsherds—“the boring stuff.” These bits of broken pottery are both the bane and the backbone of Middle Eastern archaeology, providing crucial data on how, when, and who lived in a particular place. They are also as ubiquitous as sand on a beach. As I approach the campsite at Brak, nestled in a small hollow within the massive hill, my taxi’s tires crunch with the sound of ancient pot pieces being pulverized.

Oates quickly emerged as an expert not only in identifying the many varieties of potsherds but also in interpreting them with remarkable precision. “When it comes to a mastery of pottery, there is no equal to Joan in Syria,” says New york University archaeologist Rita Wright. “She’s a very powerful and informed archaeologist with enormous experience.”

And as a Western woman excavating in Iraq during the 1950s, the woman then named Joan Lines was a pioneer. At the ancient

Assyrian capital of Nimrud, she dug under the direction of Max Mallowan, the British archaeologist married to mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie, who spent much of her time writing in the quiet of the Iraq countryside, took the young Joan under her wing, and the two would troll the souks for bargains, practicing their Arabic. At Nimrud, Joan also met David Oates. “The most important things in my life have all seemed to be just a series of coincidences,” she says in a rare private reflection. “Falling on my feet, as it were.”

That is a vital quality in the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of Middle Eastern archaeology. When the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein took over in Iraq in 1968, “heads and bodies were displayed in the square near our home, and we had to make detours so the children wouldn’t see them,” Oates recalls. The family moved the next year from Baghdad to London so David could take a professorship at an archaeology institute. In the mid-1970s, David decided that he wanted to tackle Brak, which lay just across the Iraqi border in Syria but was nevertheless part of Mesopotamia—the storied lands around and between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The dramatic site of Brak had been briefly excavated by Mallowan in the 1930s, but Christie found it not to her liking, since rainfall was too sparse for the flowers she loved to grow; they split their time with another ancient mound farther north with a slightly wetter climate.

Brak was in the archaeological boondocks. Virtually all the action during previous decades had focused on southern Iraq, in the low-lying alluvial plain that merges with the Persian Gulf. Work there had uncovered enormous ancient cities dating back to 3000 B.C. and even earlier. Mallowan worked at Ur, the legendary birthplace of Abraham, where he met Christie and helped his mentor Leonard Woolley excavate royal tombs dating to 2500 B.C. German archaeologists found the fabled metropolis of Uruk, celebrated as the place where writing originated and where the famous King Gilgamesh reigned; Uruk appears to have been a bustling metropolis by 3500 B.C. Nearby were the ruins of Eridu, viewed by the Sumerians themselves as the world’s oldest city. These ruins yielded evidence of a small building, possibly a temple, dating to 5500 B.C.

The silt laid down by thousands of years of floods coupled with the frequent rebuilding of these sites in ancient times made it difficult to penetrate down to their origins. So we know precious little about how Sumerian cities began to evolve. By contrast, much if not all of Brak sits above the floodplain. That makes its earlier levels more accessible, theoretically. In the course of his dig here, Mallowan had uncovered a mysterious building he called the Eye Temple, for its thousands of unique votive objects with flat, trapezoidal bodies and thick necks topped with pairs of huge eyes. He also found evidence of richly decorated copper and gold work as well as small clay cones painted on their ends to adorn walls. This was a style popular in distant Uruk in the centuries after 3500 B.C., so Mallowan assumed the edifice was a southern concoction. He did not suspect that under his feet was evidence of an urban society independent of ancient Sumer, and at least as old.

Arriving at Brak in 1976, Joan Oates wanted to explore the period before 3500 B.C. to see if settlement there predated the influx of southern influence. But her husband vetoed the plan as too risky. A huge mound like Brak is no simple wedding cake, with early layers below and later layers above; rather, it is a mind-bogglingly complicated mass of jumbled history. Wind and rain have had their way with the site in the 3,000 years since it was completely abandoned. Broken pottery bits have drifted down slopes, mixing with earlier potsherds. Foundations have vanished in sudden flash floods. A stone throne sits overturned in a deep gully, far from where its royal occupant once sat. Try to reach an early layer, David Oates knew, and you might find yourself exhausting both your time and money before you hit pay dirt.

And money has been a perpetual source of anxiety at Brak. The British School of Archaeology in Iraq and, later, the McDonald Institute at Cambridge University have supported the dig, but the Oates team has had to be frugal. Team members live in canvas tents during the spring and fall seasons—stifling on the frequent hot days, and uncomfortable at night when temperatures can plunge to near freezing. Only this year did electricity arrive.

So Joan patiently bided her time as she and her husband excavated the rich upper layers of the high mound. Then one day in 1981, her son spotted signs of a thick-walled building just below the surface on the northeast end of Brak, and her husband began to dig along what proved to be a fortification from the second millennium B.C. But in one corner of the excavation, Joan discovered bits of pottery dating back a thousand years farther. “I said, ‘This is where we can get at the fourth millennium B.C.,’ ” she recalls. This time her husband agreed.

It took a decade of arduous work on a steep section of the hillside to carve back through the centuries. Even the 2004 death of her husband did not halt Oates’s efforts. One morning, as if we are setting out for a stroll through the English countryside, she takes me on a walk across the mound to the massive wedge-shaped hole she and a generation of archaeologists and local workers have carefully made, its back wall soaring more than 30 feet. A slight woman in an off-white windbreaker, Oates pauses in the trench and peers around. She looks annoyed. “you are seeing here only a fraction of what’s going on, a little window on the economy of the past,” she says. “It’s terribly frustrating.” But even that small fraction that she and her team—made up largely of Syrian, American, and British excavators—have found is nothing short of revolutionary.

One of the most dramatic discoveries at Tell Brak is a large building with massive redbrick walls and ovens nearly 10 feet across. The types of pottery found, along with radiocarbon analysis of ash deposits, date the building to about 3800 B.C. By contrast, few large structures have been found from a time before 3500 B.C. in southern Iraq. Scattered across the building’s floor was a varied collection of objects, from large piles of raw flint and obsidian from Turkey to finished blades. All about lay an array of beautiful stones collected and stored for making beads: jasper, marble, serpentine, diorite. The site also contained a large chunk of bitumen, a valuable tarlike substance used to bind stone or wood, which had to have been imported from eastern Iraq or Turkey. Mother-of pearl inlays lay cut and ready to be placed in jewelry. The remains of sheep and goats abounded, as did spindle whorls, probably used to make yarn, and simple looms—all clear signs of weaving activity.

Among the most notable artifacts unearthed was a lavish, black-and-white chalice, its cup made of obsidian and its base of white marble, the two held together with bitumen. The rim of the cup showed evidence that it had been overlaid with a valuable metal such as gold, long since removed. Whoever owned the chalice clearly held great power. Nearby was a piece of clay bearing a large impression of a beautifully carved striding lion, a symbol of royalty even today. Amid a pile of mass-produced bowls were potsherds with marks similar to the pictographs that show up more than half a millennium later in the first writing system, cuneiform. Those marks may be the earliest evidence of writing anywhere in the world. “The development of symbols may have a long history in southern Mesopotamia too,” Oates says. “But we just don’t have the evidence there.” Beneath the redbrick building, Oates and her team found a more modest one dating to about 4000 B.C. This earlier structure was a center of craft production on a large scale and was also a busy site of communal cooking, judging from its huge ovens set next to plastered basins and bins. Just outside ran a street paved with pottery shards, headed for what Oates believes was a north gate facing the resource-rich mountains of Turkey. Next door, Oates uncovered a large edifice with a massive basalt threshold and thick walls, entered by passing through two small rooms, perhaps guardhouses. She believes this is the oldest administrative center yet known. Nearby, the excavators found bits of clay stamped with lion and snake motifs, seals that signified ownership of property, and a statuette with large eyes. At the Eye Temple, the site of an earlier dig on the southern side of the mound, Oates found signs that the earliest structure here dates back to about 3800 B.C. And nearby, in another trench, her team found traces of a brick platform and a wall built 1,000 years before that.

These excavations prove that Tell Brak was a place of impressive wealth and sophistication, an important trading center and a major (and previously unappreciated) player in the early game of civilization. It even had suburbs. Oates invited a team of American archaeologists to examine the area beyond the high mound, which covers only about one-fifth of the site’s nearly 750 acres. The remainder lies within the halo of smaller mounds circling the site. By methodically sampling the area inside and outside this halo—a laborious task of mapping, examining pottery, and digging small test pits—the researchers concluded that Brak covered 320 acres in the period between 3900 and 3400 B.C. Some 20,000 people may have lived within the city limits, and dozens of smaller sites lay within a 10-mile radius. And this large population—only Uruk in southern Mesopotamia is thought to have been as large in this era was supported without any irrigation.

So is Brak the world’s earliest well-documented city? There is no accepted definition of what constitutes a city, Oates points out. But the size and elaborate nature of the site certainly put it on or near a par with its southern rivals. “I would never say Brak is larger than Uruk,” she says. “But there is clearly a complex society developing in the north that is independent of the south.” Jason Ur, a Harvard archaeologist who participated in the suburban survey, adds that all the evidence “surely qualifies Brak as urban, if that term is to have any meaning.”

Ur (coincidentally sharing the name of the famed southern Mesopotamian city) was the first to jump into the trench made by that backhoe in 2006 at the small mound just north of Brak’s central hill. But it was left to Arkadiusz Soltysiak, a Polish bioarchaeologist, to sort through the human bones. He found no infants and few elderly and determined that some of the victims had suffered traumatic injuries, as might come from a blow by club or mace, that had already healed before they were killed. The incomplete, scattered skeletons made it hard for him to establish the gender of the victims, but surviving teeth hinted at a population of adolescents and young adults. Some of them also appear to have suffered from malnutrition.

Soltysiak leans toward the theory that this event at what locals call Tell Majnuna was a massacre, noting that some of the bones are from people not of warrior age. If so, it could have been an inside job. Others think the dead might have been locals who rebelled or otherwise offended the city’s elite, were put to death, and then were denied decent burial. But Augusta McMahon, who is the Brak dig’s field director, argues that the scene more closely resembles an attack. “The age profile, the piles of bodies, and the rubbish context says battlefield cleanup,” she tells me as we trudge through green wheat fields from the high mound to Majnuna. “And the corpse abuse—the way they were haphazardly piled up, the way femurs were made into tools—says the victims were enemies of whoever buried them.” One possible scenario, she says, is that Brak’s enemies attacked from the outside and managed to kill some civilians in the melee before being routed.

In either case, nabbing food or finished goods may have been a motive for the bloodshed. (Two years ago, grain shortages during a drought led to riots in this part of modern-day Syria.) Brak’s obvious concentration of wealth would pose a temptation to outsiders.

Soltysiak and McMahon agree on what happened next. The victors or perpetrators left their victims on the field for weeks or even months. The rotting corpses were eventually hauled to the shallow depression at Majnuna and unceremoniously dumped. The total body count is clearly in the hundreds, though for now excavations there have ceased. About 10 yards from the mass grave, the team found another cache of bones that are probably the result of the same incident: mostly skulls and femurs, stacked in relatively neat piles. Two dozen of the femurs were whittled at one end to a point, perhaps to dig around in the skulls of the dead, but for what purpose is unknown. Soltysiak recalls being startled to discover the human bones that had been made into tools here.

Then came a massive feast. Mixed on top of the death pit were the bones of cows, sheep, and goats along with broken plates. “The animals were cut in about the same place on a large scale, in an industrialized way,” says Jill Weber, the team’s zooarchaeologist. “Not necessarily by the same person, but in the same way.” In her mud-brick laboratory on the mound, she pulls out massive scarred cow bones. Such wholesale slaughter would have been unusual, she says, particularly the slaughter of cows, which were typically considered too valuable to kill because of milk production and plowing. “No expense was spared,” Weber says. “This was an important event.”

And it was just the start of a series of violent acts that shook ancient Brak. Back at Majnuna, McMahon points out another mass grave, dating to a century or so later, adjacent to the first pit. One clump of bones looks as if it had been piled into a bag that decayed. Just a few yards away is another mass of human bones, dating to about 3600 B.C. The victims in both slaughters appear to be young, the skeletons are jumbled, and there are no grave goods, which would have been typical in a formal burial.

Along with the bones are all manner of refuse, such as broken pottery and flint tools. Majnuna seems to have been one of Brak’s main dumps. One possibility is that the waves of enemies who threatened the city—whether rebellious locals or foreign raiders were treated like garbage. As we step off the mound, the man who owns the area containing the mass graves pulls up in his new GM pickup. “Come for breakfast!” he insists with typical Arab hospitality. As we walk down the dusty road to his home, he pulls a gun from his holster to admire it.

Violence at the dawn of civilization was not unique to Brak. An hour’s drive to the east is Hamoukar, which was a thriving settlement during the early and mid-fourth millennium B.C., around the time that Brak arose. Echoing the sophistication of its neighbor, Hamoukar had well-planned houses with courtyards, large ovens, seal impressions in the form of lions killing deer (a style seen at Brak as well). Recently a joint Syrian and American team found evidence of a battle around 3500 B.C. in which Hamoukar buildings were destroyed.

This attack may have been more than an incursion by marauders looking for food or goods. At that time, the southern city of Uruk began to expand its influence, and Uruk-style pottery appears throughout the Middle East. Possibly those southerners ran into opposition from the formidable northern settlements of Hamoukar and Brak, whose inhabitants may have resented the growing power of Uruk and its allies. Brak and Hamoukar were burned around the same time, but “evidence of both northern and southern material suggests a peaceful coexistence afterward,” Oates says. “The ‘destroyers’ could well have come from Anatolia or anywhere else.” By 3400 B.C., pottery typical of Uruk predominated, and Brak’s Eye Temple had been renovated in a southern Mesopotamian style. When Brak appears in the historical record in the third millennium, it is as the important city of Nagar. Overwhelmed by superior technology, better military organization, or a persuasive new ideology, the pioneering civilization at Brak and its environs became an adjunct of the south, which went on to create even grander city-states, bureaucracies, and empires.

Violence and cultural sophistication may in fact have gone hand in hand in creating the first urban societies. “Tell Brak is not just another archaeological site but a place where new aspects of humanity emerged, and our work has the potential to explain them,” Ur says. Finding answers in Iraq may not be possible for a very long time, given the political troubles there. This gives the exploratory digs in Syria a special urgency.

Brak’s independent advances in the north came to an abrupt end, but perhaps not a dead end. Maybe the interaction between the two competing visions, whether through trade or warfare (or both), helped spur the innovations that changed our world. “Civilization spreads like a virus. It happens in clusters and not in isolation,” says Guillermo Algaze, an archaeologist at the University of California at San Diego. In the past decade, excavators have begun to find evidence to support this idea around the globe. A thousand years after Brak lost its independence, an astonishing array of urban sites sprang up across the Iranian plateau, central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula. In the following 1,000 years, a host of interacting cultures contributed to what emerged as Chinese civilization.

In exposing one of the world’s earliest experiments in urban living, Oates and her team are illuminating both the creative and violent tendencies of humanity and painting a much richer picture of how our species left the country for life in the city, a process that is still in full swing today. “In textbooks you learn that civilization starts with Sumer, and everything else is peripheral,” says Algaze, who was once an outspoken advocate of the dominance of the south. “But Brak shows a picture more complex than that. It has forced us to think differently.”

Eyes peeled, Oates continues her push to dig even deeper into Brak’s past. “She’s brilliant—and she’s changed the field,” Algaze says. “And she’ll get to those earlier levels.” Unlike her old friend Agatha Christie, Oates is after bigger game than a single murderer. In the ultimate whodunit of civilization, the ancient people of Tell Brak were, at the very least, important accomplices.

NASA is gambling $4 billion that there’s life beneath the thin atmosphere, lethal radiation, and miles-thick ice on Europa.

The crackling radiation would kill you in 10 minutes—that is, if you did not first asphyxiate in the nearly nonexistent atmosphere, die of exposure to the –300 degree Fahrenheit temperature, or plunge into a thousand-foot-deep icy crevice. Jupiter’s moon Europa is a forbidding world, yet NASA intends to devote billions of dollars over the next decade to getting there. At the center of this effort will be the most complicated orbital explorer ever built, each of its components carefully armored against the deadly stream of particles in Jupiter’s massive wake. The orbiter will require six years to reach its destination. Then, when it arrives at Europa, engineers will consider the mission successful if it survives for just three months of exploration before shorting out.

This seemingly quixotic effort was conceived by a small but tenacious group of planetary researchers who, after years of trying, convinced budget-strained NASA officials this past February that the wildly expensive venture is a worthwhile, even crucial, investment. They succeeded because Europa—1,940 miles wide, just slightly smaller than Earth’s moon—is such an enticing paradox. Beneath its tortured, icy, and hostile surface lies a vast buried ocean, a warm global sea with perhaps a larger volume than all the water on Earth. And with liquid water comes one of the most intriguing possibilities in all of science: extraterrestrial life.

“I believe that Europa is the most promising place in the solar system for astrobiological potential,” says Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, who is set to take the role of study scientist for the Europa mission.

Through much of the past century, Mars was regarded as the only plausible place in the solar system where alien life could exist. But a dozen costly American missions have provided no solid evidence that organisms ever inhabited the Red Planet. There is not even any clear sign of liquid water there today, only intriguing hints of lakes and rivers that apparently dried up millions of years ago. That is a big reason why scientists are increasingly pinning their hopes on Europa, a world that is literally swimming in water. In February NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed to turn their gaze away from Mars and focus on Europa and the other massive satellites of Jupiter—a grouping that includes the largest moon and several exotic ocean worlds right out of science fiction, all circling the largest planet in the solar system.

The upcoming operation—currently known by its bureaucratic program name, the Europa Jupiter System Mission—heralds a new era for exploring the outer solar system. Almost everything we know about that vast realm comes from quick flybys provided by Pioneer and Voyager and broad surveys conducted by two probes, Galileo (which examined Jupiter and its moons before taking a planned suicide plunge into the giant planet in 2003) and Cassini (which is still bouncing around the Saturn system). If all goes as planned, that situation will begin to change in 2020, when a huge NASA spacecraft will set out for Europa. Soon after, ESA will launch a companion probe to Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s other giant, icy moons. Both vehicles would slide into the Jupiter system by 2026, spend a year or two touring the planet and its satellites, then settle into orbit around their respective targets.

The 9,000-pound NASA probe will bristle with a dozen specialized instruments designed to see, smell, and explore Europa from a choice vantage point 60 miles away. Its powerful radar will penetrate the surface remotely, perhaps peering all the way through Europa’s icy shell and into the ocean beneath, while other instruments make detailed maps of the fractured landscape, analyze the molecules that make up Europa’s fantastically tenuous atmosphere, and measure the radiation effects of formidable Jupiter, which dominates the moon’s sky with its pink- and salmon-colored cloud bands and swirling red storm.

One of the first orders of business will be to unravel the perplexing mysteries of Europa’s unique topography. It is one of the most geologically bizarre and active? places in the solar system. Unusual cracks—some concentric and resembling spider webs, others forming chains of conjoined arcs—commingle with odd clusters of bowl-shaped craters, strangely configured plateaus, terrain aptly dubbed chaoses, and 2,000-mile-long cracks as straight as Midwest highways. But it is the underlying ocean (and its potential for harboring life) that has sparked the most interest, as well as an unusually bitter debate within the tight-knit and typically collegial field of planetary science. If Europa’s surface is thin and porous like an Arctic ice sheet (as a few vocal researchers assert), then a rich soup of organic chemicals and oxygen from the radiation-soaked surface may have percolated down, seeding the underlying ocean with the essential building blocks of life. But if the shell is thick (most scientists suspect it averages 10 miles or more), there is little chance for contact between surface and sea, and the prospect for living organisms is far smaller.

To most researchers the nature of the ice determines whether Europa really is a plausible home for alien life. Bluntly put, the ice could be either a protective canopy or a killing lid, and the Europa Jupiter System Mission aims to figure out which. “Thick ice does mean it’s harder for life,” Pappalardo says. Then he hedges a bit: “It certainly doesn’t rule it out.” Even if the ice is thick, there may be ways life could have originated and persisted on Europa. For instance, an active, churning mantle below the sea might bubble up heat and chemicals that could serve as the basis for biology. “We don’t know yet how thick the ice is, but I think the surface tells us there’s an interesting geology there,” says Ron Greeley, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University who cochairs Europa’s science definition team.

Patience is a necessity rather than a virtue among planetary scientists. Seeing a mission through from conception to fruition can consume much of a researcher’s career. When Pappalardo began to push for a Europa mission a decade ago, there was no gray in his long ponytail. And even if all goes smoothly, the lanky 45-year-old will be close to retirement age when the first results from Europa traverse the millions of miles between Jupiter and Earth. Time is even more of the essence for Greeley, who by then will be pushing 90. “We do these things not just for ourselves but for our students and their students,” he says. In fact, one of his former students is Pappalardo.

NASA’s flagship missions, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the Cassini probe, are few and far between, and they require years of quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiation before the first component is manufactured. Researchers typically must first agree on a priority, which can entail long cycles of meetings, correspondence, and presentations and often involve a competition. NASA must then win White House approval for such major missions and convince Congress to provide funding. The Europa mission is projected to cost nearly $4 billion, making it by far the most expensive robotic mission in history (in current dollars, at least).

Even by the standards of this slow-motion field of science, Europa’s advocates have been remarkably tenacious. Three times in the past 15 years they put forward proposals, only to see their hopes dashed. At first, even Pappalardo was unconvinced that Europa had a buried ocean, much less one that could support life. “I was a skeptic,” he recalls. Since there is no way to see through Europa’s surface ice, all evidence of an ocean lying beneath it was circumstantial. Pappalardo published a 1999 paper questioning the evaluations by his colleagues of a liquid sea. But newer analyses based on Galileo’s flybys in the late 1990s and early 2000s made him change his tune. Once he became convinced the water was there, he started pushing much harder for a dedicated mission to go back to Europa and find out for sure.

Growing up on Long Island, Pappalardo was seduced by astronomy early. He began hanging planets from the ceiling of his bedroom at age 7. While studying at Cornell University in the mid-1980s, he sat in on a seminar with Carl Sagan and was enraptured by speculation of oceans on distant moons. As a researcher at Brown University in the late 1990s, Pappalardo worked on the Galileo mission when the first detailed pictures of the planet’s icy satellites were beamed back to Earth. Later he landed a job at the University of Colorado at Boulder before moving to JPL, the mecca of solar system exploration.

Pappalardo’s low-key, almost shy manner and science-casual style of dressing are deceptive. He is part of a savvy new breed of researchers who are as comfortable roaming the halls of NASA headquarters, chairing a meeting of colleagues, or chatting with congressional staffers as they are with crunching data in their offices. But for years his convictions, connections, and persuasive arguments were not enough to win a green light for a Europa mission. The stunning 1996 discovery of a purported fossil in a meteorite from Mars reignited public and scientific fascination with that planet, and NASA embarked on a cycle of biennial missions to tackle the intriguing question of life there—past or present. Little money was allocated to initiate other planetary missions.

Meanwhile, engineers were struggling with the technical challenges posed by the intense radiation pummeling Europa. Coming up with a way to protect a spacecraft and its sensors from that harsh environment proved tremendously difficult, and cost estimates for the Europa mission skyrocketed. Even then, no one could guarantee that the research phase of the mission would last longer than a month. That meant spending what amounted to more than $30 million a day to explore Europa. NASA abandoned the effort in 2002.

A Mosaic of Europa’s icy surface details surprising cracks, fissures, and jumbles.Image: NASA/JPL/DLR

A short while later, the Europa mission came back to life, when it was linked with an experimental ion propulsion system powered by a nuclear fission reactor, the pet idea of Sean O’Keefe, then NASA’s administrator. But that effort tanked after O’Keefe resigned in late 2004 and the agency abandoned the system. By then the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, coupled with cost overruns in several of NASA’s big science missions, put tremendous strains on the agency’s funding. Plans for sending a large spacecraft to the outer solar system were put back on hold.

When NASA was once again ready to turn its sights to the worlds beyond the asteroid belt, Europa was no longer the obvious target. In 2005 the Cassini spacecraft circling around the Saturn system spotted a plume of water vapor and ice particles shooting out from the south pole of the little moon Enceladus, evidence of water below its surface. That same year a European probe that had traveled with Cassini plunged into the thick, foggy atmosphere of the moon Titan and—together with the mother ship’s measurements from above—found evidence of an ocean of ammonia and water hidden beneath a stunning landscape of dunes, mountains, and rivers. The organic-rich environment, coupled with liquid methane rain, wowed astrobiologists, while the exotic surface fascinated geologists. Moreover, the strangely Earth-like nature of Titan cast a spell on NASA officials eager to choose a target that would capture the public’s imagination.

Given this embarrassment of opportunities, NASA decided in 2007 to conduct a four-way horse race among Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and the Jupiter system as a whole. Europa and Titan won the initial face-off, and the two moons went head to head last year. The competition was heated. The Titan plan was a romance right out of Jules Verne, with a hot-air balloon—dubbed the Montgolfière after the French brothers who designed the first one—soaring along through Titan’s thick, smoggy atmosphere. By contrast, the plan for visiting Europa called for a standard-issue space probe. Plans to put a lander on the surface to drill through the ice in hopes of reaching the ocean had to be abandoned because of cost and technical uncertainty, leaving only an orbiter.

This time, the years of planning and persuasion by Pappalardo and his colleagues paid off. The NASA judges concluded that the science returns of both proposals were of equal merit. But when it came to executing the mission, the Titan scenario was deemed a higher risk.

“There has been a decade of investment on the Europa mission,” NASA manager Curt Niebur told planetary scientists last March in a packed hotel ballroom in Bethesda, Maryland, shortly after the announcement. “And the team had a relatively mature design.”

Pappalardo got news of the Europa decision while he was in Washington, D.C., chairing a meeting of a NASA advisory panel on the origin and evolution of life. “I was relieved, happy, and exhausted all at once,” he says. “This was news I had waited for nearly a decade.”

There has been little time for celebration since then, as the ESA’s approval and NASA’s funding are still not firm. “This mission has not yet left the Beltway, much less the Earth,” William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis warned his colleagues at the Bethesda meeting. “We need a couple of years of a unified community to get this thing going, and if we get our ducks in a row, we’ll be heard.” Some Titan supporters are muted in their enthusiasm for Europa, and the scientists who remain committed to seeking life on Mars understandably fear that a Europa probe will divert funds from their missions. NASA managers have promised that Titan remains the next priority for the outer solar system and pledged a small amount of funding for further work on the mission’s detailed design, although it is hard to mask the pain of such a major delay in the slow-paced world of planetary exploration. NASA also insists that it can move ahead with Europa without penalizing its Mars program.

Pappalardo’s challenge is hardly over, however. Now he and his fellow Europa boosters have to fight to retain their place in the budget. The space shuttle is slated for retirement next year, and the replacement launcher, called Ares, is taking longer to build and costing more than originally anticipated. Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants NASA to divert more money to Earth observation in order to provide data on global climate change. And the price tags on some of NASA’s more immediate robotic probes—such as the Mars Science Laboratory, now under construction—are soaring. All that puts pressure on the space agency’s limited science budget. Nor is the Ganymede mission a sure bet. Over the next two years, the ESA will pit Ganymede against two other proposed astrophysical observatories.

Scientific competition and jockeying for political support are nothing new in astronomy; they are not even new when it comes to studying Jupiter and its satellites. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei and German astronomer Simon Marius both claimed to have been the first to spot the planet’s four large moons (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Io). Galileo proposed naming the moons after his powerful patrons, the Medicis, in a bid to win favor and funding. Not to be outdone, Marius suggested they be called the Brandenburgian stars, after his patrons. Neither nomenclature caught on.

Years later, at a fair in Regensburg, Germany, Marius ran into the famed astronomer Johannes Kepler, who jokingly suggested the satellites instead be named after Jupiter’s mythological “irregular loves”—three maidens and one youth who were seduced by the king of the gods. Eventually those names stuck (although Galileo, not Marius, does get credit for the discovery in today’s textbooks, because he published first).

For nearly four centuries, astronomers still knew little about the “Galilean” satellites. Never coming closer to Earth than 350 million miles, Europa looked like nothing more than a fuzzy blob through even the most powerful telescopes. The arrival of the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 changed all that. The pictures from Voyager showed an odd and dynamic world. Europa’s smooth, billiard-ball-like surface was covered with cracks, a landscape that eerily resembled Earth’s Arctic ice in winter. The images provided the first observational support for an intriguing idea that, until then, had been solely theoretical: The Jovian moons might have oceans on the inside.

Just one month before Voyager’s arrival, a research team had published the first serious model laying out how a liquid ocean could exist within a planetary body in the chilly outskirts of the solar system. The secret of this warmth is in the stately dance between Jupiter and his four lovers—Io closest to the massive planet, Europa next, followed by Ganymede and finally Callisto. Over billions of years, three of these satellites have settled into a graceful cosmic rhythm. Io completes one circle around Jupiter in half the time it takes Europa, and Europa, in turn, moves through its orbit in half the time it takes Ganymede.

This dance, however, is not perfect. Jupiter’s gravity creates tides—a periodic stretching—on the moons as they circle. Tides, in turn, create friction and therefore heat. There is no question who is leading this dance: The relatively small moons are no match for Jupiter’s enormous girth. On Io, which orbits at about the same distance from the planet as the Earth to the moon, the heat is so intense that it triggers sulfurous plumes from massive volcanic vents, which spew into space. On more distant Gany­mede and Callisto, Jupiter’s effects are not so dramatic. There is probably enough sloshing between core and crust to keep those moons’ interiors from freezing completely, but not enough to melt water within a hundred miles of the surface.

Ice that thick effectively seals off the surface—and its potentially life-giving chemicals—from the water below. Europa, however, lies in a zone that planetary scientist Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson calls “the sweet spot,” where Jupiter’s impact makes the moon neither too hot nor too cold.

A year after Galileo arrived in the Jupiter system in December 1995, it swooped within 430 miles of Europa, sending back images resembling a pale blue cracked Easter egg. Among the most intriguing pictures were those of an area called Conamara Chaos. Structures that look like ice rafts are floating in a refrozen matrix; the remarkable absence of craters there points to a geologically active surface and hints that liquid water may have welled up from below in the recent past. That discovery caught the attention of biologists as well as planetary scientists. We know that terrestrial ice sheets can extend half a mile down into the ocean on Earth, yet still support a complex ecology at their base. And sulfur-feeding bacteria flourish at the darkest depths of the oceans, serving as the foundation of a food chain so exotic as to seem virtually extraterrestrial.

Greenberg believes something similar may be happening on Europa. He sees compelling evidence that the moon’s massive tides crack the ice, allowing liquid water to percolate up. And areas like Conamara Chaos offer additional evidence of an ice shell that extends only five or six miles at most, he contends. Such thin ice could screen out Jupiter’s damaging radiation but still admit organic matter—primarily from comet impacts—and some sunlight for photosynthesis. Organisms might find niches in the moon’s many surface cracks amid the regular ebb and flow of Europa’s tides. And below, along possible volcanic vents on the ocean floor, other forms of life could flourish in the sunless depths. “As far as we know, the conditions and ingredients on Europa could sustain substantial complex life,” Greenberg says.

It is a compelling vision, echoing Arthur C. Clarke’s description of Europa’s alien sea creatures bobbing through the dark waters in his novel 2010: Odyssey Two. But most planetary researchers are unconvinced by Greenberg’s theories. They insist that dynamic features like Conamara Chaos could form even in a thick ice crust. Such technical discussions about the depth of the ice shell carry so profound an underlying question—is Europa alive or is it dead?—that they have degenerated into a bitter dispute that at times veers into personal insult and angry countercharges.

At the center of the fracas is Greenberg, who, with his curly hair, thick gray mustache, and gentle manner, hardly fits the image of a scientific bête noire. He earned a degree in physics at MIT, where he went on to receive a doctorate in planetary science in 1972. By the late 1970s he had won a coveted spot on the Galileo imaging team and later landed a rare tenured job in the field. “He’s the oldest of the old boys,” says one younger colleague.

But in his recent book, Unmasking Europa, Greenberg paints himself as a disrespected outsider and accuses colleagues of dishonesty, idea theft, and undermining both his reputation and the careers of his graduate students. “People who don’t adhere to the party line [of thick ice] are shut out,” Greenberg insists. The thick-ice proponents, he charges, have prevented a fair hearing of the thin-ice theory by ignoring and distorting his views.

In an area called Conamara Chaos, a remarkable absence of craters points to a geologically active surface.

Many of Greenberg’s colleagues say they are stunned by his unusually personal attack within a small and highly collaborative field. Pappalardo dismisses Greenberg’s charges against him as “absurd and untrue” and adds, “There’s more going on here than scientific debate.” Far from attempting to silence Greenberg, Pappalardo says he has done whatever he could to engage his colleague.

Invited by Pappalardo to write a chapter in a recently published book on Europa, Greenberg declined. “He said he was too busy,” Pappalardo recalls. While bristling over the personal nature of Greenberg’s attack, he insists that he is far from dogmatic on the issue of ice thickness. “Some of his hypotheses make for great challenges—pushing the system is always a good thing.”

A key source of all this frustration is the lack of information about Europa. Detailed maps cover not much more than a tenth of its surface, providing tantalizing but incomplete images of the mysterious moon. That makes for a sort of scientific cabin fever, as researchers reanalyze images, tinker with models, and ponder new ways to explain the complicated world that is, for now, utterly out of grasp. That also can create a herd mentality, say several planetary scientists. “You can get an establishment view if you have limited data,” explains Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who worked on the now pushed-back Titan mission.

ASU’s Greeley, who tends toward a thick-ice view and has been another target of Greenberg’s ire, admits that “there is often a bandwagon mentality” that stems from these long waits. He knows, having been involved in NASA lunar and planetary missions for more than four decades. “We’re left with a crystal ball,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who is one of the few researchers openly sympathetic to Greenberg’s views. “And people project their own scientific hypothesis onto it.”

The bitter truth is that the new Europa mission, even if it reaches its destination, survives the onslaught of the magnetic field, and successfully returns new data, may still not lay to rest the question of the probability of life. Whether the probe’s radar can penetrate deep into the ice and beyond—much depends on the composition of both ice and ocean—remains to be seen. And since NASA has promised the Titan team that it is next in line for an outer-planet mission, a Europa lander that could plumb the moon’s depths and truly seek out alien life there remains in the realm of science fiction. “All these worlds are yours except Europa,” the HAL 9000 computer informs Earth in Clarke’s 2010. “Attempt no landings there.”

Pappalardo says that the job of the current generation of scientists is to do the hard work to ensure that the next generation will reap the results. Though he may be as gray as Greeley is today when the Europa mission arrives, he intends to fight hard to ensure that a lander will follow, just as Greeley’s generation fought for Galileo. That is something Greenberg, who calls Europa a “fantastic and wonderful place,” can happily agree with. “The stakes are high, and so are the emotions,” adds Lunine, who is still optimistic about the Titan mission despite its defeat. “People go home and dream about this stuff.”

But until this Europa mission is on its way to Jupiter, there is little time for rest.

 

WHAT LIES BENEATH

Europa’s fractured, frozen surface (left) conceals a global ocean buried below, most scientists now agree. What they do not know is how thick that ice is, a factor that strongly affects the prospects for life on this moon. The artist’s renderings illustrate two possibilities. In both, tides caused by Europa’s eccentric orbit around Jupiter create internal heat that melts the base of the icy crust. If the heat is intense enough (center), it might melt the ice almost all the way to the surface; in that case, organic matter and sunlight from above could reach the ocean, creating promising conditions for biology. If the heat is weaker (right), Europa might have a thick layer of warm ice atop its ocean. That warm ice could slowly rise and flow, much like glaciers on Earth, but it would present a daunting barrier to life.

 

Courtesy of Discover website

Top 100 Stories of 2008 #13:

A nation delights in its pioneering venture

“It was as if all spring festivals, new years, and Christmases had come at once,” a breathless Chinese commentator wrote in the China Daily. An enraptured Chinese public watched last September as a 42-year-old astronaut—“taikonaut” in Chinese parlance—floated for about 15 minutes outside the Shenzhou VII capsule traveling 213 miles above Earth. That pioneering space walk, part of the country’s third human mission into orbit, thrust China’s space ambitions onto the world stage.

As reported in Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po newspaper, Yang Liwei, the first taikonaut and now deputy director of China’s astronaut training center, says that about 14 people will be recruited soon to train for life aboard a Chinese space station. Other Chinese space officials predict that the station will be launched by 2020.

China is not a partner in the International Space Station now under construction by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. But NASA officials recently visited Beijing for low-level talks about cooperation, continuing a dialogue begun two years ago.

Courtesy of Discover website

Top 100 Stories of 2008 #78:

In 2007, excavators of a remote site in southeastern Iran reported finding evidence of a writing system that dates back more than 4,000 years. Featuring odd geometric symbols, three baked mud tablets unearthed near the Iranian city of Jiroft could reveal much about a sophisticated and independent urban culture that flourished between the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley civilizations. However, many scholars are skeptical about the authenticity of the finds, which they ­suspect may have been planted by locals.

Archaeologists first began digging at large mounds near Jiroft in 2001 after flash floods uncovered ancient graves nearby. The team has since found evidence of a large city dating to 2500 B.C.

Courtesy of Discover website

Top 100 Stories of 2008 #66:

While the corpses of their enemies still lay on the battlefield, the victors celebrated by slaughtering cattle and holding a gigantic feast. Then they dumped the war dead into a pit, heaved in the animal bones from their repast, and tossed their plates on top of the pile.

Now—nearly six millennia later—the unearthing of these remnants in what is now northeastern Syria is a spectacular archaeological find, one of several important discoveries made recently at Tell Brak, a 130-foot-high mound jutting above the northern fringe of the Mesopotamian plain.

Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard University say Brak was one of the earliest and largest cities in the region—and therefore the world. That assertion is shaking up Near Eastern archaeology, since scholars long assumed that the first substantial cities arose in southern Mesopotamia in today’s Iraq

Courtesy of Discover website

The doomsday rock is out there. It’s just a matter of time…

In 2004, as a massive tsunami roiled through the Indian Ocean killing hundreds of thousands of people, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster potentially even more lethal. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was hurtling toward a possible collision with the most populated swath of Earth—Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. Furiously crunching numbers on their computers, the researchers put the odds of impact in the year 2029 at exactly those of hitting the number in a game of roulette: 1 in 37.

“We usually deal with one chance in a million,” recalls Steven Chesley at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This was absolutely extraordinary—I didn’t expect to see anything like it in my career.” By the end of the day on December 27, 2004, to the relief of the observers, archival data turned up trajectory information that rendered the odds of a collision nil. Nonetheless, in 2029 the asteroid, dubbed Apophis—derived from the Egyptian god Apep, the destroyer who dwells in eternal darkness—will zoom closer to Earth than the world’s communications satellites do. And April 13, 2036, it will return—this time with a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting somewhere on a line stretching from the Pacific Ocean near California to Central America.

Because Apophis was discovered during one of the world’s greatest natural disasters, the worries about the impact went largely unnoticed. But that tense day, December 26, 2004, stunned the small group of astronomers who dutifully detect and plot trajectories of hundreds of thousands of the millions of chunks of rock whizzing around the solar system. Though too small to end civilization—unlike the asteroid that may have doomed the dinosaurs—Apophis could pack a punch comparable to a large nuclear weapon. Traveling at 28,000 miles per hour, it would heat up as it passed through Earth’s atmosphere, turning the dark rock into a fiery sun as it arced across the sky. Then it would either explode just aboveground—as one most likely did in 1908, leveling a vast forest in the Tunguska region of Siberia—or gouge a crater 20 times its size. “If it hit London, there would be no London,” says Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who had closely followed the discussion of the potential 2029 impact. Slamming into the ocean, Apophis could create a tsunami dwarfing the one that killed more than 200,000 people around Indonesia.

Apophis is one of millions of asteroids roaming the solar system. None are known to pose an immediate threat, but some are bona fide civilization stompers. A monster rock discovered just this year, with the prosaic name of 2007PA8, is more than two miles across, large enough to wipe out most of humanity. Fortunately, the odds that it will hit are essentially zero. Smaller asteroids are less deadly but much more common. Planetary scientists now estimate that 150-foot-wide space rocks, comparable to the one that hit Tunguska, strike only once every thousand years or so. For a brief time in 2004, just months before the Apophis scare, astronomers feared that a 150-foot-wide asteroid was just days away from racing into the atmosphere. Fast-paced observations allowed them to calculate a more exact orbital path, which took it far from Earth.

After a number of false starts, such potential close calls have finally caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. At the request of lawmakers, scientists are struggling to pinpoint 90 percent of all seriously life-threatening asteroids by 2020 in order to assure at least some warning. The European Space Agency is contemplating a mission to test ways to push such an object off a threatening trajectory, the first serious attempt at developing a planetary defense.

But a group of astronauts, led by Schweickart, also wants their respective countries and the United Nations to prepare for avoiding a hit. “We’re living in a shooting gallery,” he warns. “We’ve evolved to the point where we can do something about this threat. We can either close our eyes as we cross the street and not know what we’ve dodged, or we can open our eyes and act accordingly.”

Amid fears about global warming, terrorism, disease, and nuclear proliferation, the threat of rocks from space may seem more the province of bad Hollywood movies than front-page news. Even professional astronomers have long dismissed asteroids as undistinguished flotsam and jetsam, would-be planets that circle the sun endlessly in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Their derision left the field of asteroid hunting largely to amateurs and eccentrics.

Only recently have researchers glimpsed the dangers lurking in our deceptively quiet neighborhood. “Impacts are a fact of life in the universe, but when we look up, it’s not what we see,” says Carolyn Shoemaker, who, together with her late husband, Gene, pioneered ways of spotting asteroids and comets. It was geologists who first noticed the evidence of huge impact craters on Earth that had formed long after the solar system settled into its present form, prompting biologists to speculate on whether those collisions dramatically altered life’s evolution. Later, using new technologies on the ground as well as robotic spacecraft, scientists like Shoemaker started to track, catalog, and closely examine the objects.

With each new sighting, asteroids turn out to be far more varied, unruly, and bizarre than astronomers dreamed. Many have companions. Some are rubble heaps held together only loosely by their own gravity. Others are extremely dense nickel-iron objects. Their colors can range from a deep dark chocolate to a glinty white. Even the old distinction between comets (dirty snowballs) and asteroids (hard rocks) has become blurred. Some comets eventually turn into asteroids as they burn off their ice and lose their tails while traveling through the warm inner solar system. And comets—which mostly reside in the solar system’s far fringes—pop up occasionally in the asteroid belt. They may even be directly responsible for life on Earth. Donald Yeomans, who calculates the orbits for near-Earth objects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that comets flung out from that belt pummeled our planet shortly after its formation and could have left behind water, possibly creating the conditions that allowed Earth to become a cradle for life.

The vast bulk of asteroids—millions of individual objects ranging from 560-mile-wide Ceres to pea-size pieces of space shrapnel—reside in a broad zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the legendary asteroid belt. If pulled together, all this material would form a mass smaller than Earth’s moon, but the immense gravitational force of Jupiter prevents the bits from coalescing into a solid planet. When the rocks approach Jupiter, the occasional asteroid can find itself pushed out of the procession and into deep space; some spin out beyond Pluto’s orbit, while others fall toward the sun, each with its own unique orbit. Some even find a home around other planets. Mars’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos—along with several of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s satellites—may be captured asteroids.

The NEAR-Shoemaker probe made the first detailed study of a near-Earth asteroid in 2001. Image courtesy of NASA/JHAUPL

What most interests and worries scientists like Chesley and Yeomans, however, are near-Earth asteroids—those with orbits disconcertingly close. Members of this class apparently ushered the dinosaurs off the evolutionary stage 65 million years ago and left a three-quarter-mile-wide hole in the Arizona desert less than 50,000 years ago. A few scientists think a near-Earth asteroid on a bull’s-eye path might even have reshaped human history (see “Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?”). Somewhere in space, one of their kind is orbiting its way to an inevitable rendezvous with Earth: The question isn’t if we will be struck again, but when. There are scattered reports of deaths by meteorites through recorded history, like a Chinese chronicle asserting that thousands died during a 1490 meteor shower. One prediction is indisputable: With growing populations comes greater risk. Had the 1908 impact in Siberia landed in an urban area, for example, it would have been as devastating as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Yet it wasn’t until the early 1970s that anyone seriously pursued how to track these potentially deadly objects. A few pioneers like the Shoemakers began to catalog the faint smudges on the glass plates they used to photograph the night sky. University of Arizona astronomer Tom Gehrels revolutionized that work by turning to charge-coupled devices, or CCDs—electronic light detectors, now common in cameras—to gather much better data than was possible using plates. In 1992, NASA set up the first formal effort to detect near-Earth asteroids.

The race was on, and it swept up a new generation of scientists, like Tim Spahr. As a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1996, he and fellow student Carl Hergenrother noticed an asteroid the length of two football fields heading almost directly toward Earth. Further calculations showed that the object, named 1996 JA1, would pass by at less of a distance than the moon is from Earth, spawning the first widespread media coverage of an asteroid threat. “It’s the reason I have my job,” says Spahr, now director of the Minor Planet Center run by the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University in Massachusetts. “And it changed everything.”

Just two weeks after Spahr’s asteroid whizzed by, researchers at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, given the task by the military of spotting enemy spy satellites, unveiled a novel approach (pdf) for monitoring large areas of the sky using sophisticated software. The MIT group found nearly 50 asteroids within a couple of months—far faster than their competitors. “Soon the other surveys were getting their butts kicked,” recalls Spahr, who joined one of two University of Arizona teams rushing to incorporate the latest technology into their efforts.

The sudden popular interest had some embarrassing side effects. Hollywood went to work on a series of moderately ludicrous disaster movies—Deep Impact, Armageddon, and Asteroid (featuring the other guy from The Terminator). But there was also tangible progress. In 1998, Congress ordered NASA to spot all near-Earth asteroids two-thirds of a mile in diameter and larger—the ones that scientists say could wipe out civilization—by 2008. Meanwhile, the world’s space agencies began to bring their expertise to bear on the problem. Just a few months before Spahr’s discovery, NASA launched NEAR (for near-Earth asteroid rendezvous), a spacecraft to visit the near-Earth asteroid Eros. (Gene Shoemaker died while the probe was en route, and NASA renamed it NEAR-Shoemaker.) Arriving in 2000, the probe orbited for a year before controllers crashed it into Eros—but not before it sent back tens of thousands of detailed images of the 20-mile-wide banana-shaped asteroid. Eros’s surface—boulder strewn, heavily cratered, strangely smooth—was a geologic puzzle.

The Japanese got in the game too. In 2005, the Japanese probe Hayabusa hovered a dozen miles away from a lumpy asteroid named Itokawa, then collected some material in anticipation of a 2010 return to Earth. Radio contact with the probe was lost for a while, however, and it is uncertain whether it will return to Earth.

By 2005, lawmakers in Washington asked NASA what it would take to be able to spot 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids more than 460 feet in diameter by 2020. Astronomers say that incoming asteroids smaller than that would have a regional, rather than global, effect; ones that are less than about 180 feet are likely to disintegrate in the atmosphere. “There aren’t very many huge objects, so you don’t get hit by them very often,” Spahr says. “But as you get smaller, there are more and more.”

Finding smaller asteroids requires a whole new level of technology, and NASA is struggling to find ways to deliver the information Congress requested. Some astronomers have proposed a satellite orbiting near Venus that could easily spot asteroids that are hard to see from the ground. But NASA is in a budget crunch, so space-rock hunters are pinning their hopes on two earthbound projects. The National Science Foundation plans early in the next decade to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope with a 28-foot mirror. Meanwhile, aided by pork-barrel money won by a Hawaiian senator, work is under way on Pan-STARRS, a set of telescopes to be sited on Mauna Kea that will cover most of the sky every few nights down to a dim 24th order of magnitude. When these telescopes see light within the next few years, the result will be dramatic. David Morrison, a leading impact researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, predicts a hundredfold increase in discoveries, which will make Schweickart’s shooting gallery metaphor more believable. “We tend to find one scary asteroid a year,” Morrison says. “Soon it will be one a week!”

The details of Apophis’s discovery in 2004 showcase the evolving art of asteroid detection. Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi spotted the object while trolling the skies at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory on Kitt Peak. Fans of the TV series Stargate SG-1, the three astronomers named the asteroid after an alien intent on destroying Earth. Science fiction, however, quickly took a turn toward reality show. At the Minor Planet Center—which absorbs asteroid data from all over the world—Spahr’s colleague Kyle Smalley took a closer look at the object’s path. “All the main-belt asteroids move across the sky in a procession,” he says. “And this thing was stepping out of line in this parade, so it caught my eye. It was obvious this thing was coming close to Earth.”

Finding smaller asteroids requires a whole new level of technology, and NASA is struggling to find ways to deliver the information Congress requested. Some astronomers have proposed a satellite orbiting near Venus that could easily spot asteroids that are hard to see from the ground. But NASA is in a budget crunch, so space-rock hunters are pinning their hopes on two earthbound projects. The National Science Foundation plans early in the next decade to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope with a 28-foot mirror. Meanwhile, aided by pork-barrel money won by a Hawaiian senator, work is under way on Pan-STARRS, a set of telescopes to be sited on Mauna Kea that will cover most of the sky every few nights down to a dim 24th order of magnitude. When these telescopes see light within the next few years, the result will be dramatic. David Morrison, a leading impact researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, predicts a hundredfold increase in discoveries, which will make Schweickart’s shooting gallery metaphor more believable. “We tend to find one scary asteroid a year,” Morrison says. “Soon it will be one a week!”

The details of Apophis’s discovery in 2004 showcase the evolving art of asteroid detection. Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi spotted the object while trolling the skies at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory on Kitt Peak. Fans of the TV series Stargate SG-1, the three astronomers named the asteroid after an alien intent on destroying Earth. Science fiction, however, quickly took a turn toward reality show. At the Minor Planet Center—which absorbs asteroid data from all over the world—Spahr’s colleague Kyle Smalley took a closer look at the object’s path. “All the main-belt asteroids move across the sky in a procession,” he says. “And this thing was stepping out of line in this parade, so it caught my eye. It was obvious this thing was coming close to Earth.”

Across the continent at JPL, Steven Chesley began to fine-tune the orbit (pdf). On December 20, he placed the odds of a collision at 1 in 5,000. Three days later, with more data, those odds grew to 1 in 250. “We kind of missed Christmas that year,” he says. The odds kept getting higher as he analyzed the trajectory more thoroughly. By the day after Christmas—the day of the Indonesian tsunami—the odds reached an alarming 1 in 37. The researchers quietly plotted the likely plane along which the asteroid would pass but did not release the information to the media. If that plane intersected Earth, then the impact area would lie somewhere along a narrow band crossing the North Atlantic, Europe, and southern Asia. “We know there is an asteroid out there with our name on it,” adds Chesley. “We just didn’t expect to find one so soon.”

Then researchers poking around in the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch survey archives came to the rescue. An observation made earlier in the year shifted the asteroid’s projected path just enough to one side to spare Earth. “That ruled out the possibility of an impact conclusively,” Chesley says. He and the handful of other scientists breathed a sigh of relief. But like every near-Earth asteroid, Apophis will keep orbiting, so the risk will not go away. Although the next pass has only a 1-in-45,000 chance of colliding, future encounters could pose a greater risk. Calculating odds farther ahead is extremely difficult, though, because so many slight gravitational influences change an asteroid’s path over time.

Schweickart was deeply shaken by the Apophis experience. “I don’t know how to transmit to you the emotion, the level of intensity of a group of people you could name on two hands during those days in December 2004,” he says. His interest in the asteroid threat extended back to 2001, when he and a few colleagues sat down at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston just six weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington to discuss ways to deflect an incoming asteroid. That led to his founding an organization named for the asteroid that was the home of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince—the B612 foundation. Its goal is to alter an asteroid’s orbit in a controlled manner by the year 2015.

Since the first serious asteroid scare in 1996, astronomers have pondered a multitude of ways to deflect an incoming rock. Some researchers suggest sending nuclear weapons, Hollywood-style, to blow up the asteroid; others propose a simple crash landing that would shove the body into a slightly new orbit. Another method would unfurl mirrors that would vaporize part of the rock. Two spacecraft—NEAR-Shoemaker and Hayabusa—have already played tag with asteroids, while another has experimented with shooting a projectile into a comet. Most of the proposed defense methods would require careful study of an asteroid’s composition—you might simply create a rocky doughnut by trying to blast one apart.

The European Space Agency recently took these ideas into a more concrete direction by releasing a concept for a spacecraft called Don Quixote that could push at an asteroid while another spacecraft (called Sancho, of course) hovers nearby to monitor any change in its orbit. Schweickart and his colleagues propose instead that a space tug could rendezvous with an asteroid and change its trajectory simply by using the probe’s gravitational pull. The advantage to this approach, he says, is that you don’t need to touch the asteroid or ascertain its makeup to move it out of a dangerous trajectory. The disadvantage is that the tug lacks muscle and could make only small adjustments to the orbit. The former astronaut has so far made little headway within NASA—which is focused instead on returning men to the moon—or even among many scientists who prefer to spend precious funds on asteroid detection.

So what would we have done if Apophis were on a collision course with Earth in 2029? Once Schweickart plotted the asteroid’s potential landfall, he suddenly realized the threat’s political and legal implications. If a city-busting rock were heading toward Iran, would the United States take the lead and spend billions of dollars to stop it? By nudging an asteroid off course, a probe would send it on a new trajectory. What if the probe could not complete the maneuver and shifted the threat elsewhere?

Such concerns led the ex-astronaut and Air Force pilot to tap members of an exclusive club he founded called the Association of Space Explorers—men and women who have, briefly, been near-Earth objects themselves. “This group of people can get the attention of national leaders all over the world,” Schweickart says. This January, the group wined and dined donors at a fund-raiser in Oakland, California, and they recently held a workshop in France, the first in a series to hash out a draft United Nations treaty to cope with the asteroid threat. To Schweickart, a matter of life and death trumps space science: “Do we really need to know more about a moon of Jupiter compared with being prepared to protect life on Earth?”

That attitude is bound to irritate a lot of space scientists. Yeomans, for example, insists that the three most important things to do are “find ’em early, find ’em early, and find ’em early.” NASA researchers have their own plan, the Near-Earth Object Program—the agency’s program to spot 90 percent of all potentially hazardous asteroids more than two-thirds of a mile wide that might hit Earth in the foreseeable future. Amateur astronomers, long major players in ascertaining the exact orbits of asteroids, are likely to play less and less of a role as professionals turn their powerful telescopes to the objects once considered too mundane for academics to study at all. One way or another, astronomers say they intend to find every sizable rock that might be rushing at Earth. By 2020, we should know whether we need to save ourselves from going the way of the dinosaurs. “We take our snapshot now,” Spahr says, “and we’ll be good for centuries.”

Courtesy of Discover website

 

The archaeologist talks about the loss of artifacts and why he fled his homeland.

Uruk, located near Basra in Iraq, was one of the world’s first cities, and it is where the first writing system emerged. Babylon, just an hour’s taxi ride from Baghdad, was long the world’s largest and most sophisticated urban center. And the first truly international empire was ruled from the great Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, near today’s Mosul in the northern part of the country

The past four years of war and political turmoil have threatened that invaluable heritage—both above and under the ground. Donny George Youkhana, who chaired the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, has been placed in jeopardy as well. The 56-year-old archaeologist has been vilified as a Baathist sympathizer by American neoconservatives, criticized as pro-West by Sunnis, and viewed with suspicion by Shiites because of his Christian background. “I never knew if I would make it to work,” he says of his daily life in Baghdad since 2003. “Or if I would make it home.” In 2006 he left Iraq, joining the ranks of more than 2 million Iraqis who have fled since 2003. Last November he accepted a teaching position at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is one of only a few hundred Iraqi refugees who have been admitted to the United States.

Donny George, as he is known in the States, started his career in archaeology as a storeroom assistant at Iraq’s National Museum, an institution that houses not only most of the artifacts excavated in Iraq during the past 150 years but also a vast store of knowledge on one of the first centers of civilization. Located in the center of Baghdad just off Haifa Street—now one of the most dangerous spots on the planet—the museum was founded in the 1920s by Gertrude Bell, an extraordinary British historian who helped draw Iraq’s borders, choose its first king, and negotiate a peace among Mesopotamia’s many clashing tribes.

Over the past three decades, George spent much of his time working on excavations in the field. Before the war, I accompanied him, along with some foreign archaeologists, to a site deep in the flat desert of southern Mesopotamia, where he was directing a dig at a buried 5,000-year-old Sumerian city. He talked of attending the weddings and funerals of the local tribe in order to win their trust and support in protecting the site. But when we arrived, he slung a rifle over his shoulder. During those hard years of economic sanctions, looters were already a danger.

George’s foreign colleagues judged him among the best and brightest of Iraqi archaeologists. But what made him a virtual celebrity was his role in the aftermath of the April 2003 looting of the museum. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the melee with the memorable phrase “Stuff happens.” While other antiquity officials avoided the media, George welcomed television cameras and print reporters to the museum grounds. His criticism of the U.S. failure to intervene helped turn the shocking event into a symbol of an invasion gone awry, and he traveled the world seeking financial and moral support for his battered institution. Although it turned out that most of the museum’s priceless artifacts were safe, thousands of pieces are still missing—a significant loss for any museum—and the search for them continues. Over time, George’s diplomacy won the trust of the Americans in the Green Zone and also of the emerging Iraqi authorities: In 2004, he was put in charge of the Iraq Museum as well as the country’s regional museums.

Meanwhile, the political tide in the capital began to turn. In 2006, a new Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, staffed largely by members of the party led by fundamentalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was set up to oversee the organization. George says the combination of professional frustration and a threat to his son’s life made him take his family first to Syria, then to America. “I never wanted to leave the board—that was my life,” he told me as we sat in the living room of his family’s modest new home, just a few miles from the Stony Brook campus, where he is teaching Mesopotamian history and archaeology. On the mantel, lit by small tea candles, stood an image of Jesus and Mary.

With regard to the care of antiquities, how do you compare the Saddam era with the way things are today?

Saddam wanted projects to bolster his image, to show that he was a patron of history and antiquities, as were the ancient leaders of Iraq. Now, with the interference of new people who are illiterate about cultural heritage, everything is much more problematic.

Did you ever meet Saddam?

One time, when I was field director at Babylon. He arrived by car on September 21, 1987, stayed for two hours, and left by helicopter. We walked through the museum there, and he noticed an ancient inscription by King Nebuchadnezzar translated into Arabic and En glish. It mentioned that the king had been sent by the gods to serve and to lead the black-headed people. For some reason, Saddam told me the translation must be changed. I said, “No, this is a scientific translation, and we can’t change it.” He didn’t say anything, but later a bodyguard grabbed me by the arm and asked how I could say no to the leader. Then he said, “Don’t worry, you are safe.”

The bricks in the Babylon reconstruction are stamped with Saddam’s name. Whose idea was that?

This was his order, that we commemorate the reconstruction the same way that it was done in ancient Iraq, by some device such as stone monuments. The next day the written order came, and we put together a committee that decided that we stamp each brick with his name, and he approved that.

Did Saddam ever visit the Iraq Museum?

Only once, before he was president. He never came after that. That says to me he was not really interested in history and archaeology.

Did the Saddam regime interfere with your work?

We felt we had a good measure of independence as a scientific institution. There was never any interference when I was excavating or writing reports. But my contacts with foreigners were closely monitored. The one time it really hurt was when they formed a special team in 2003, before the invasion, to store safely the museum artifacts. I knew everything in the museum and had worked to store everything before the Gulf War in 1991. I think they were afraid, since I knew foreigners and was a Christian, that I would reveal the secret place where the material was stored. That really hurt.

How did you react after the museum had been looted?

I was angry. I knew it could have been prevented; I knew American forces were beside the museum and didn’t do anything. It was a very, very big mistake that could have been prevented. Like most Iraqis, I thought the arrival of the Americans was very welcome, but when you work as an archaeologist for 30 years, love the field, and know each piece, and then you see all the destruction and looting—this was very hard. I can’t support people who did not protect the museum. And I can’t blame the soldiers—they didn’t have orders.

What is the impact on Iraq as scientists and professionals like you leave?

I have seen hundreds like me leave. A good number, if they could not travel abroad, work in the north, in Kurdistan. But the result is a complete drain of good minds from Iraq. In 2003, there were big hopes people would come back and work.

How did the new Iraqi government handle antiquities?

In 2004, I was made director of museums, and from the start they started sending people loyal to al-Sadr’s party to monitor and control everything in our institution. They interfered in every single thing and changed things without our knowledge. They encouraged the staff of the department to go directly to the ministry, rather than through us. They removed people not connected to the party and put people in who were not qualified. It is worse than under Saddam.

How is the new minister, who was appointed in 2006?

He’s a dentist, and his wife—who is a member of the Parliament—is a relative of al-Sadr. I knew he knew nothing about antiquities, so I went to see him and explain how we work. After about 10 or 15 minutes, I realized there was a complete wall between him and me. He seemed to be listening but not following. I felt helpless. Afterward, he continued the same policy as his predecessor. He appointed one person without experience in manuscripts to be in charge of manuscripts. And the director of manuscripts was moved to the excavation department. It would be amazing if he even knew where Babylon was—it’s not his field. I was by then chairman of the board, and I had the authority of a deputy minister. But I was given no authority over personnel or budget.

At the end, I found myself coming to work, sitting there, and doing nothing. The last straw was when I was told by the minister’s adviser that I should look after myself. He said the al-Sadr party had given an order that since I was Christian, I should not be allowed to keep my job, that it was very important a Shiite Muslim have the position. I was shocked. I understood that if I stayed, they would fire me, or it would lead to problems or even assassination. That happens. A month or so later—the 30th of July—I applied for retirement. And the minister approved it immediately. Normally, a minister would call to find out the reason a senior official resigned, so it was clear he was waiting for me to quit. A week or so later we left Baghdad.

What is the status of the museum today? Is it threatened?

About three or four months before I left, we had a mass kidnapping take place in the street outside the museum. A dozen official cars painted in camouflage drove up, full of personnel who were completely armed, equipped, and wearing uniforms. They took 50 people off the street. Shortly after, the interior minister announced that they had nothing to do with the kidnapping. I immediately called my senior staff and asked one simple question: What can we do if these people come to the museum, accuse us of hiding something in our storerooms, and demand to go in? Can we stop them? We agreed there was no stopping them, so we started immediately securing the museum. We put antiquities in the registration rooms and labs into boxes, took them down into the storeroom, and started welding the iron doors. For a day and a half, we welded all the doors leading to the storerooms and to the museum area. And the last thing we did was to build a wall half a meter thick with bricks and concrete at the entrance. The museum was completely sealed. Now, unfortunately, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wants to reopen the museum just to show the outside world Baghdad is OK and everything is fine. The museum director e-mailed me that she’s under pressure to reopen. Of course it would be ridiculous to do this. [Since this interview, the tourism minister has been forced to resign, along with several other Shiite ministers. The museum remains closed.]

How bad is the looting in southern Iraq?

Last year, al-Sadr’s followers attacked and burned the museum of Nasiriyah and its library. They said to the guards—and I know this is true because I spoke with them—“tell [local inspector] Abdul Amir Hamadan we will do to your antiquities exactly what the Taliban did!” In Najaf, al-Sadr’s party was heard to tell worshippers that looting artifacts is ethical so long as the money goes for guns or building mosques. And we have started to have problems in an area in Basra called Zobeir—the original Basra—which was founded by the caliph Omar in A.D. 638. Our inspector says people are building houses on the site, in practice destroying the first Islamic city that was built outside the Arab peninsula. Historically, Omar is considered the enemy of all Shiites. So is it being destroyed intentionally or just neglected? I don’t know. But I’m worried this is exactly what happened to the Samarra mosque and shrine [destroyed in a sectarian bombing in 2006]. This kind of conflict might also lead to huge destruction of Islamic monuments and archaeology. We have an armed force of 1,400 men to patrol the provinces, and we managed to get some cars from the State Department and about 45 cars from Unesco. We concentrated on Nasiriyah because the looting was so bad there and because there are over 700 archaeological sites in the area. Inspector Abdul Amir [Hamadan] and his team did a very good job, patrolling, arresting looters, and sending looted antiquities to the museum. But rich people on the city council with ties to the Islamic parties are agitating for easy access to antiquities.

Are archaeological sites in the north around Mosul—such as Nineveh and Nimrud—secure?

There are 1,600 sites in the Mosul area alone, but the situation is not as bad as it is in the south. The museum is safe; it’s closed and there’s no one there. People in the north and middle part of the country have always been much more educated, more careful with ancient sites, than the people in the south. It’s not their fault. They were not educated and given what they need to live. In the late 1990s, I saw Iraqis starving in the south because of bad policies.

 

Courtesy of Discover website

 

2,000-year-old nomadic treasures, shielded from the Taliban and nearly lost, resurface in a stunning exhibition in Paris.

At the close of 2003, a small group of Afghan, Russian, and U.S. officials gathered in the high-walled presidential compound in Kabul to witness the opening of a long-hidden collection of Afghanistan’s most treasured artifacts. From a dusty storeroom belowground came breathtaking collapsible gold crowns from the 2,000-year-old graves of nomadic princesses; delicate ivories from the ancient summer palace of the rich rulers of the Hindu Kush, whose empire stretched from today’s India to today’s Iran; and Alexandrian glass, Chinese mirrors, and Indian coins brought by camel and horse from the far reaches of the Old World two millennia ago. Now a sample of these magnificent artifacts is on display at the Musée Guimet in Paris through the end of April, and the exhibition is likely to travel to other cities in Europe and the United States.

The stars of the show are pieces from the hoard of Bactria—a collection of more than 20,000 gold objects recovered from a mound in northern Afghanistan on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion, which plunged the country into more than two decades of bloody conflict. In 1977 Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi had begun nosing around the 2,000-year-old mound—tellingly called Gold Hill by the locals.

What Sarianidi and his colleagues found were the remains of a half-dozen wealthy nomads—mostly women—wearing gold sandals, gold jewelry, even dresses with gold thread. The artifacts displayed an astonishing combination of styles—Siberian- influenced animals, Chinese dragons, Greek goddesses. Among the artifacts were coins minted in Rome, Parthia, and India—testimony to the vibrant Silk Road of that civilization’s day. The remarkable site promised to illuminate the lives of Central Asian nomads and their close connections to the great empires of that age. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan cut short further excavation, though, and the artifacts were put in storage. When the mujahideen edged toward Kabul in the late 1980s, the collection was quietly locked away in the presidential treasury.

 

Archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi is unearthing a chain of long-forgotten towns built 4,000 years ago on the plains of modern Turkmenistan. His finds challenge conventional thinking about culture, trade, and religion in the ancient world

Thousands of people lived in towns like Gonur with carefully designed streets, drains, temples, and homes. To water their orchards and fields, they dug lengthy canals to channel glacier-fed rivers that were impervious to drought. They traded with distant cities for ivory, gold, and silver, creating what may have been the first commercial link between the East and the West. They buried their dead in elaborate graves filled with fine jewelry, wheeled carts, and animal sacrifices. Then, within a few centuries, they vanished.

News of this lost civilization began leaking out in the 1970s, when archaeologists came to dig in the southern reaches of the Soviet Union and in Afghanistan. Their findings, which were published only in obscure Russian-language journals, described a culture with the tongue-twisting name Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Bactria is the old Greek name for northern Afghanistan and the northeast corner of Iran, while Margiana is further north, in what is today Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Through the region runs the Amu Dar’ya River, which was known in Greek history as the Oxus River. Western scholars subsequently used that landmark to dub the newly found culture the Oxus civilization.

Courtesy of Kenneth Garrett

The initial trickle of information dried up in 1979 when the revolution in Iran and war in Afghanistan locked away the southern half of the Oxus. Later, with the 1990 fall of the Soviet Union, many Russian archaeologists withdrew from Central Asia. Undeterred, Sarianidi and a handful of other archaeologists soldiered on, unearthing additional elaborate structures and artifacts. Because of what they have found, scholars can no longer regard ancient Central Asia as a wasteland notable primarily as the origin of nomads like Genghis Khan. In Sarianidi’s view, this harsh land of desert, marsh, and steppe may instead have served as a center in a broad, early trading network, the hub of a wheel connecting goods, ideas, and technologies among the earliest of urban peoples.

Harvard University archaeologist Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky believes the excavation at Gonur is “a major event of the late 20th century,” adding that Sarianidi deserves credit for discovering the lost Oxus culture and for his “30 consecutive years of indefatigable excavations.” To some other researchers, however, Sarianidi seems more desert eccentric than dispassionate scholar. For starters, his techniques strike many colleagues as brutish and old-fashioned.

These days Western archaeologists typically unearth sites with dental instruments and mesh screens, meticulously sifting soil for traces of pollen, seeds, and ceramics. Sarianidi uses bulldozers to expose old foundations, largely ignores botanical finds, and publishes few details on layers, ceramics, and other mainstays of modern archaeology.

The ancient Oxus culture may have arisen at sites like Anau, a settlement at the base of the Kopet-Dag mountains, which dates back to 6500 B.C. Later settlements like Gonur, roughly 4,000 years old, may have been founded by people from the Kopet-Dag cultures.

An apparent royal burial site at Gonur contains luxury goods, a cart with bronze-sheathed wheels, and the remains of a camel.

An American team works at Anau, in the foothills of the Kopet-Dag mountains. Map courtesy of NASA; photos courtesy of Kenneth Garrett

His abrasive personality hasn’t helped his cause, either. “Everyone opposes me because I alone have found these artifacts,” he thunders during a midday break. “No one believed anyone lived here until I came!” He bangs the table with his cane for emphasis.

 

Sarianidi is accustomed to the role of outsider. As a Greek growing up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, under Stalinist rule, he was denied training in law and turned to history instead. Ultimately, it proved too full of groupthink for his taste, so he opted for archaeology. “It was more free because it was more ancient,” he says. During the 1950s he drifted, spending seasons between digs unemployed. He refused to join the Communist Party, despite the ways it might have helped his career. Eventually, in 1959, his skill and tenacity earned him a coveted position at the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, but it was years before he was allowed to direct a dig.

When he finally received permission to run his own excavations, Sarianidi worked in northern Afghanistan during the relatively peaceful decades of the 1960s and 1970s. His most famous discovery there came just before the Soviet invasion in 1979. His team uncovered an astounding hoard of gold jewelry in the graves of Bactrian nomads who lived around the first century A.D. But the region’s mysterious Bronze Age sites, dating to the second and third millennia B.C., intrigued Sarianidi more. His excavations revealed thick-walled structures built with regular proportions and a distinctive style of art. Most scholars had thought that such sophisticated settlements had not taken root in the region until more than 1,000 years later.

Sarianidi had long suspected that similar sites might be found beneath a collection of strange mounds he had glimpsed during a 1950s trip in the Kara-Kum desert, a barren region in the middle of eastern Turkmenistan. Later, during a brief visit to a colleague’s dig in that area in the mid-1970s, he commandeered a car and driver to investigate the site more closely. It was June, he recalled, and the heat was so overpowering he had to overcome an urge to turn back. Then, not far from the rough road, he spotted mounds rising up from the plain.

In treeless areas, such geographic features often indicate ancient settlements formed from mud-brick structures that later human occupation has compressed over time into artificial hills. The site covered so much land that Sarianidi assumed it dated from medieval times. So he was astonished to find pottery resembling what he had found in ancient Bactria.

When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan forced him and other archaeologists to relocate to other areas of interest, Sarianidi remembered this site, which locals call Gonur, and determined to return. In the early 1980s, he came back to Turkmenistan, working at Gonur and other sites.

What he has uncovered at Gonur is a central citadel—nearly 350 by 600 feet—surrounded by a high wall and towers, set within another vast wall with square bastions, which in turn is surrounded by an oval wall enclosing large water basins and many buildings. Canals from the Murgab River, which once flowed nearby, provided water for drinking and irrigation. The scale and organization of this construction was unmatched in Central Asia until the Persians’ arrival in the sixth century B.C.

Figurines with elongated bodies are common artifacts of the Oxus culture.

Sarianidi’s team has also turned up intricate jewelry incorporating gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. The prowess of the Oxus metalworkers—who used tin alloys and delicate combinations of gold and silver—were on par with the skills of their more famous contemporaries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, Lamberg-Karlovsky says. Their creations display a rich repertoire of geometric designs, mythic monsters, and other creatures. Among them are striking humanoid statues with small heads and wide skirts, as well as horses, lions, snakes, and scorpions.

Wares in this distinctive style had long been found in regions as distant as Mesopotamia to the west, the shores of the Persian Gulf to the south, the Russian steppes to the north, and the great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which once flourished to the east—on the banks of the Indus River of today’s Pakistan. Archaeologists had puzzled over their origin. Sarianidi’s excavations seem to solve the puzzle: These items originated in the region around Gonur.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a handful of Western researchers got word of Sarianidi’s finds and began to investigate for themselves. Fredrik Hiebert, a young American graduate student, learned Russian, visited Gonur in 1988, and then a few years later returned with his Harvard adviser, Lamberg-Karlovksy. A team of Italians followed to dig at nearby sites and to examine Gonur’s extensive cemetery. The Westerners brought an array of modern archaeological techniques, from radiocarbon dating to archaeobotany. U.S. labs determined that the early phase of the Gonur settlement dated to 2000 B.C.—five centuries earlier than Sarianidi had initially postulated—and that the people grew a wide variety of crops, including wheat, barley, lentils, grapes, and fleshy fruits.

Small seals bearing this type of design, which originated in the Indus Valley of today’s Pakistan, demonstrate the extent of the Oxus trading network.

The archaeological record shows that the site was inhabited for only a few centuries. The people of Gonur may simply have followed the shifting course of the Murgab River to found new towns located to the south and west. Their descendants may have built the fabled city of Merv to the south, for millennia a key stop along the Silk Road. Warfare among the Oxus people could have undermined the fragile system of oasis farming, or nomads from the steppes may have attacked the rich settlements. Sarianidi has found evidence that extensive fires destroyed some of Gonur’s central buildings and that they were never rebuilt. Whatever the cause, within a short period Oxus settlements declined in number and size, and the Oxus pottery and jewelry styles vanished from the archaeological record. The large and square mud-brick architecture of the Gonur people may live on, however, in the clan compounds of Afghanistan and in the old caravansaries—rest stops for caravans—that dot the landscape from Syria to China.

Why the Oxus culture vanished may never be known. But researchers think they have pinned down the origin of these mysterious people. The answers are turning up in traces of mound settlements bordering the rugged Kopet-Dag mountains to the south, which rise up to form the vast Iranian plateau. The most prominent settlement there lies a grueling 225-mile drive from Gonur. At this site, called Anau, three ancient mounds poke up from the plains. Volunteer

An ivory mosaic panel that adorned a room at Gonur shows mythical creatures with the head of a bird and the body of a lion.

Lisa Pumpelli is working there in a trench at the top of a large mound with a spectacular view of the Kopet-Dag mountains. She is helping Hiebert, who is now an archaeologist with the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., track down the precursors to the Oxus culture. Both are following in the footsteps of Lisa Pumpelli’s grandfather, Raphael Pumpelly, and great-grandfather, also named Raphael Pumpelly (Pumpelly is an alternate spelling of the family name). “I’m digging in my great-grandfather’s back dirt,” Pumpelli quips.

Trained in geology, the elder Pumpelly believed that Central Asia in ancient times was wetter and more fertile that it is now. He hypothesized a century ago that “the fundamentals of European civilization—organized village life, agriculture, domestication of animals, weaving, etc.—were originated on the oases of Central Asia long before the time of Babylon.” Such assertions sounded radical—even outlandish—at that time, but Raphael Pumpelly was persuasive. An adventurer and son of an upstate New York surveyor, he convinced industrialist Andrew Carnegie to fund his expedition, charmed the authorities in Saint Petersburg into granting permission for a dig in 1903, and was even provided with a private railcar. He was 65 years old when he arrived.

Jewelry, carved images of wheat, and the remnants of a stone eagle are among the artifacts from an apparent royal burial at Gonur.

The mounds at Anau, just off the Trans-Caspian railway, immediately caught Raphael Pumpelly’s eye. A Russian general searching for treasure had already cut through the oldest of them, so Pumpelly and his son began there, using methods that were surprisingly modern in an era when most archaeologists were fixated on finding spectacular artifacts. “A close watch was kept to save every object, large and small . . . and to note its relation to its surroundings,” Pumpelly wrote in his memoirs. “I insisted that every shovelful contained a story if it could be interpreted.”

The close scrutiny paid off. One shovelful yielded material later determined to be ancient wheat, prompting Pumpelly to declare that Central Asian oases were the original source of domesticated grain. Although that claim later proved false—subsequent Near Eastern finds of wheat date back even earlier—it was the first recorded instance of serious paleobotany.

Other objects from Gonur include gold and silver dishware (top) as well as elegantly carved stone figurines with ivory details (bottom).

In 1904 a plague of locusts “filled the trenches faster than they could be shoveled,” Pumpelly wrote, and plunged the area into famine, forcing him to abandon the dig. Traveling east, he noted the mounds dotting the foothills of the Kopet-Dag, indicating the sites of ancient towns similar to Anau that had survived on the water flowing down the slopes. Venturing northeast into the forbidding Kara-Kum desert, he examined locales along the ancient course of the Murgab River but turned back amid heat so brutal, he wrote, that “I gasped for breath.” He had come just a few miles short of where Sarianidi would later find Gonur.

Pumpelly clung to his vision of an early civilization that thrived along the rivers flowing down from the Kopet-Dag. Years later, Soviet archaeologists working along the mountain foothills confirmed that as early as 6500 B.C., small bands of people were living in the Kopet-Dag, raising wheat and barley and grazing their sheep and goats on the mountains’ foothills and slopes. That’s a few thousand years after these grains were domesticated in the Near East but much earlier than most researchers had thought likely, supporting Pumpelly’s view that Central Asian culture developed much sooner than commonly believed.

By 3000 B.C., the people of the Kopet-Dag had organized into walled towns. They used carts drawn by domesticated animals, and their pottery resembles the kind later found in Gonur. Many Soviet and Western archaeologists suspect that the Oxus civilization—at least in Margiana, the region in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—evolved from this Kopet-Dag culture.

Small silver pins found at Gonur include a camel (left) and a sculpted head (right). Merchants must have used camels to transport trade goods like these across the Central Asian desert.

What prompted the settlers to abandon the Kopet-Dag and migrate into the area around Gonur? One possibility is drought, says Yale University archaeologist Harvey Weiss. He theorizes that the same drought that he claims destroyed the world’s first empire—the Akkadians in Mesopotamia—around 2100 B.C. also drove the Kopet-Dag peoples from their homes. If the small streams that poured out of the mountains stopped flowing, life in the arid climate would have been impossible. That would have forced the people of Kopet-Dag to head toward Gonur and settle by the Murgab River, the only reliable source of water in the Kara-Kum. With its headwaters in distant Hindu Kush glaciers, the river would have continued flowing even in the hottest summers or longest droughts.

Another possibility is that population growth forced people down from the mountain slopes and onto the plains, where the Murgab then flowed lazily into a delta, creating an oasis of dense brush teeming with game, fish, and birds. That could explain why so many Oxus sites are built on virgin soil, as if carefully planned in advance. “The people came from the foothills of the Kopet-Dag with baggage, a knowledge of agriculture, irrigation systems, metal, ceramics, and jewelry making,” says Iminjan Masimov, a retired Russian archaeologist who once excavated Oxus sites in Margiana.

Indeed, many Kopet-Dag sites appear to have been abandoned about 2000 B.C., just around the time Gonur and nearby sites took root. Hiebert’s excavation at Anau, however, shows that it at least remained inhabited even as Gonur flourished.

While scholars debate the relationship between the Oxus culture and other early urban settlements, there is no dispute about the importance of the Kopet-Dag as a natural highway for nomads, traders, and armies between the Central Asian steppes and the Iranian highlands. The evidence is unmistakable when Hiebert shows me around the ruins of a medieval mosque on the summit of one of Anau’s mounds. Damaged by time and earthquakes, the edifice is still famous for the two serpent-dragon mosaics—showing more the influence of China than of Mecca—that once guarded its facade. Around us are hundreds of mysterious little constructions, Stonehenge-like, each made of three small bricks. Hairpins and bits of cloth—probably linked to Central Asian shamanism—are scattered about the hilltop. Women come here to pray for children. One family, three generations of women, sits silently in a row by a tomb. Hiebert casually picks up glazed Iranian ware and a bit of Chinese blue pottery. “Here is your Silk Road,” he says.

These tiny figures show not only the craftmanship of the Oxus people, but also the importance of animals in their culture.

The find dovetails with Sarianidi’s work at Gonur, where he has found a Mesopotamian cuneiform seal not far from an Indus Valley stamp bearing symbols above an etched elephant. Both lay near small stone boxes similar to those manufactured in southeastern Iran. These items provide tantalizing hints of commercial traffic on a Silk Road predating by two millennia the trading route that eventually linked China to Europe in the early centuries A.D. Hiebert likens the Oxus civilization to Polynesia—a scattered but common culture held together by camels rather than canoes.

Sarianidi sees the settlers of the Oxus region as traders, not just in goods but also in faith. For him, Gonur is the capital of a people who came from the West with a religion that evolved into Zoroastrianism. In the long, still desert evenings at his camp, he speaks of migrants fleeing from drought-plagued Mesopotamia to this virgin land, bringing a conviction that fire is holy, as well as techniques for brewing a hallucinogenic drink called soma. Eventually, some wandered farther east, part of the migration of Aryans on horseback who conquered India about 3,500 years ago. This theory of his finds little support, however. “Sarianidi has persuaded few if any archaeologists of his strongly held opinions,” says Lamberg-Karlovsky.

Sarianidi may be the last archaeologist in the mold of the 19th-century adventurer, with a larger-than-life swagger, a sharp tongue, and a thick stubborn streak. Few researchers today can claim to have laid bare acres of ancient settlements virtually unknown a generation ago. The desert freed Sarianidi from the repression of the Soviet Union. In return, he uncovered the lost history of the desert.

On the excavation team’s last night at Gonur for the season, we picnic in the desert, reclining on rugs and pillows like Turkomans, toasting with vodka like Russians, and enjoying roast lamb as Oxus shepherds no doubt did four millennia ago. “Here you understand who you are,” Sarianidi says, lying like a pasha on his cushions. A stocky and robust man, he looks worn, almost frail, in the twilight. “I am one of those who cannot go on living without the desert. There is no place like this in the world. I want to be buried here.”

 

Courtesy of Discover website