Welcome back to the Abstract!
This week, we’ll continue to channel that spooky season energy by unearthing the old “dead body in a well” trope. No, it’s not Samara Morgan of The Ring fame, though nobody can deny her skill at being a scary dead body in a well. It’s a different well body from a different time.
Who is this corpse? How did it get in the well? And just how dead is this person? These pressing matters, and more, will be revealed in our main story on the extremely dead Well-man of Sverresborg Castle.
From there, we’ll check-in on tardigrades, watch some fly fights, and sit in on a gorilla election. Enjoy!
The Saga of the Well-man
Sverris Saga, an Old Norse epic, is packed with tales of heroic feats, marriage alliances, dynastic feuds, and bloody battles during the life of Sverre Sigurdsson, who reigned as King of Norway from 1177 to 1202. In one passage, the King’s enemies successfully infiltrate Sverresborg Castle, his fortress in Trondheim, setting it ablaze and tossing a corpse into the drinking well and covering it with boulders.
In 1938, workers excavating the ruins of Sverresborg Castle found human remains under boulders at the base of its well, raising the eerie question of whether this was the same corpse mentioned in Sverris Saga. Now, more than 800 years after the violent conquest of the fortress, scientists have conducted radiocarbon-dating and DNA-sequencing on the remains to find out.
In a new study this week, the team confirmed that the “Well-man” is very likely to be the person from the Middle Ages text, marking the first time that real corporeal bones have been linked to a character in these epics (even if it’s just a dead one).
“In Sverris Saga, the Old Norse saga of King Sverre Sigurdsson, one passage details a 1197-CE raid on the castle and mentions a dead man thrown into the well,” said researchers led by Martin Rene Ellegaard of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “Radiocarbon dating supports that these are that individual’s remains.”
The Old Norse sagas documented real people and events, but they were embellished with supernatural elements and propagandic flattery of power brokers. These epic works are also a literary wellspring that has fed modern fantasy genres, particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkein. So while many characters in the sagas are known to have existed, there is still something jarring about this real skeleton emerging out of legendary lore.
The bottom of the well at Sverresborg Castle today. Image: Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research
But who was the Well-man? He was previously assumed to have been one of King Sverre’s Birkebeiners, who were defeated in a sneak attack by the rival Bagler army. Before we proceed, I must pause to linger on the fantastic sources of these names: ‘Birkebeiner’’ means ‘‘birch legs,’’ allegedly because the King’s men used primitive birch bark as leg and footwear, while the Baglers, who were coordinated by the national representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, were named for the Norse word bagall, meaning ‘‘bishop wand.’”
You really can’t ask for a better match-up than Birch Legs versus Bishop Wand. That is premium, grade-A Norse content. But to get back to the actual study, the team was surprised to untangle the details of the Well-man’s ancestry written in DNA extracted from his tooth.
“Our genomic analyses confirm that the Well-man was indeed a male and augment the historical text with predictions about his physical appearance: that he likely had blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair,” said the researchers, who noted he was about 30 to 40 years old. “More interestingly, our results show that his ancestry can be traced to the southernmost counties of Norway, most probably Vest-Agder.”
His southern ancestry is weird because the Well-man was expected to be on Team Birch Legs, a group largely from central Norway. But he appears to be more closely related to Team Bishop Wand, suggesting he could have been a Bagler raider who died during the sneak attack, or sometime before it, and whose body was thrown into the well by his own invading kin.
“Previous reports had assumed that the Well-man was a central Norwegian, from the losing side of Birkebeiners,” the team said. “Our results unequivocally show that the Well-man’s ancestry was typical of the present-day population of the southern Agder counties, but of course cannot tell us whether the Well-man belonged to the Birkebeiner or the Bagler army.”
“While the intent of the Baglers is not known for certain, the Sverris Saga text indicates that they aimed to render the castle undefendable and uninhabitable for King Sverre and his followers,” the researchers added. “It has been speculated that throwing a body into the well was an attempt at biological warfare” as casting “a corpse into the only stable, nearby source of drinking water would lead to pollution of the water, an effect that could have only been amplified by a diseased corpse.”
The mystery of the Well-man’s allegiance remains unsolved for now, but he does appear to indeed be the corpse from the saga. Imagine if you secured a place in history just for being a dead body skunking up the well—and then, to add insult to injury, people in the future named you after your own watery grave. This guy is not even alive in his own epic story! Oh well, it seems it didn’t turn out well for the Well-man.
In other news…
Tardigrades Laugh in the Face of Death
Tardigrades, a group of microscopic animals, are simultaneously adorable and indestructible—indestruct-adorable, you might say. Also known as water bears and moss piglets, these animals can withstand bullets, extreme dehydration, the vacuum of space, six times the pressure of deep seas, temperatures from near absolute zero to more than 300°F, and 1,000 times more radiation than the lethal dose for humans.
What’s the deal with these tiny toughies? Much ink has been spilled trying to answer this question, including a study this week that sought to specifically determine how tardigrades endure intense radiation. By analyzing the genome of the newly discovered tardigrade species Hypsibius henanensis, a team identified several genetic keys to the tardigrade defense system, including evidence that these animals have borrowed genes from radiation-resistant bacteria.
Image: Lei Li李磊 et al. “
“Whether the radiation tolerance of other tardigrade species occurs through conserved mechanisms or is specific in the genus Hypsibius warrants additional study,” said researchers led by Lei Li of the Beijing Institute of Lifeomics. “Functional research on these radiotolerance mechanisms of tardigrades will further broaden our understanding of cellular survival under extreme conditions and may provide inspiration for promoting human health and combating disease.”
Fight Club for Stalk-Eyed Flies
If you’re a male stalk-eyed fly looking to mate, it helps if the stalks that project your eyes out from your head, called eyestalks, are longer than other males. That’s table stakes for dating in stalk-eyed-fly-land. The female flies simply prefer longer eyestalks, and males with longer eyestalks are better at fighting off short-stalked males.
Yet male flies that carry an X chromosome associated with shorter stalks have still managed to reproduce enough to maintain the chromosome’s presence in the general population. What gives? How are these short-stalks staying in the gene pool?
Stalk-eyed fly. Image: Rob Knell
To figure out what’s going on here, scientists “staged, filmed, and scored contests between pairs of eyespan-matched males to evaluate whether X chromosome type impacts the behavior and outcome of aggressive interactions,” according to researchers led by Kimberly Paczolt of the University of Maryland.
“Within a trial, we defined fighting ‘bouts’ as beginning when either fly performed an aggressive behavior and ending when the flies were more than one body length apart or not facing each other for 3 seconds without exhibiting an aggressive behavior,” the team said. “Aggressive behaviors were categorized as either high-intensity (HI) behaviors that involved physical contact (tussle, attack/lunge, and jump attack) or low-intensity (LI) behaviors that involved males mutually displaying their eyestalks in close proximity (approach, flex and extend, and line-up eyestalks).”
Wonderful. Science can take many forms, including gladiatorial tournaments for freaky flies that flex their eyestalks for sex. The upshot of this insect Fight Club is that flies carrying the X chromosome proved to be more intense fighters, even against opponents with longer eyestalks. These males may “gain reproductive success” by “their willingness to engage in intense fighting behaviors,” the study concluded. Through sheer heart, these insects have kept their genes in the mix even with the odds stacked, or stalked, against them.
Gorillas Might Be More Democratic Than We Thought
Gorillas live in troops led by large silverback males that aggressively defend harems of female mates, along with their offspring, from rivals. But despite this strict social hierarchy topped by silverbacks, new research suggests that troops make some decisions, like when to move on from a certain location, through a consensus-building process that resembles voting.
“Due to their sheer size and force, silverback male gorillas have long been seen as their groups’ sole decision-makers,” said researchers led by Lara Nellissen of the University of Neuchâtel. “Our analyses did not support this hypothesis. Instead, we found evidence for the alternative hypothesis that travel decisions were based on consensus-building involving most or all adult members.”
“We found that two factors had a disproportionately large impact on individual decisions to terminate a resting event: the number of vocalizers and if high-ranking individuals were the initiators,” the team continued, noting that it is plausible that “grunt-like calls functioned as ‘votes’ towards a common goal.”
In other words, while silverbacks and high-ranking females call most of the shots, the troop does have input on some matters. I thought it was especially interesting that the researchers found that ”all adult individuals participated in the voting” and that “consent by the silverback was not necessary, as the group sometimes departed without him.”
Interestingly, gorillas aren’t the only animal that exhibits this behavior: Macaques, wild dogs, and meerkats have also been observed voting on group decisions. So if you’re an American casting your ballot in November’s election—or a voter elsewhere in the world—you are participating in a multi-species tradition of consensus-building about where, and when, to move on.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
