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posted by on Monday March 13 2017, @05:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the really-big-spiders dept.

The Silk Road was a series of ancient trading routes that spanned Asia, reaching as far as the Middle East and Europe. Self-organizing and vast, it fell under the control of various empires—but never for long. The polyglot civilizations of traders who lived along its routes are the subject of legends, and more recently the Silk Road lent its name to an infamous darknet market. Historians usually date the Silk Road from roughly the 200s to the 1400s. But a new study in Nature suggests the trade routes may be 2,500 years older than previously believed and its origins much humbler than the rich cities it spawned.

Historical accounts of the Silk Road begin in China in the 100s, when the Han Dynasty used its many routes to trade with the peoples of Central and South Asia. Han soldiers protected the roads and maintained regular outposts on them, allowing wealth and knowledge to flow across the continent. Monks wandering the Silk Road brought Buddhism from India to China, while merchants brought spices, gems, textiles, books, horses, and other valuables from one part of the continent to the other. Great Silk Road cities such as Chang'an (today called Xi'an) and Samarkand grew fat on wealth from the routes that passed outside their walls.

But Washington University in St. Louis anthropologist Michael Frachetti and his colleagues wondered how people traversed the many difficult stretches of the Silk Road that switchbacked through the mountains of Central Asia. Even though these routes weren't urban or under the protection of soldiers, people used them all the time to pass between Asia and the Middle East. We can see where these travelers camped at over 600 archaeological sites in the mountains. Writing in Nature, Frachetti and his colleagues describe how they had to devise a new approach to track the routes people took between these camps.

The problem was that previous scholars assumed people took routes that resembled what a "least cost" algorithm would draw—essentially the easiest path. This is "largely effective in lowland zones where economic networks and mobility between urban centers are consistent with ease of travel," the researchers write in their paper. But those algorithms won't work in the mountains, on uneven terrain that was often barren.

To predict the Silk Road's high-elevation routes, they argue, means following in the footsteps of nomadic peoples who trekked across these mountains with herd animals for thousands of years. "More than 50 years of research concerning nomadic adaptive strategies in Asia's highland elevations suggests that 'ease of travel' was probably not the dominant factor dictating mobility across the mountains," they explain.

Source: ArsTechnica

Abstract available online:
  Michael D. Frachetti, C. Evan Smith, Cynthia M. Traub, Tim Williams, Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia's Silk Roads, Nature doi:10.1038/nature21696


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday March 13 2017, @06:28PM (2 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 13 2017, @06:28PM (#478554)

    "Sure, you can take the lower pass and save two days, but it has 50% more sudden snowstorms, 20% more landslides, 30% more bears, 5 more rickety bridges over the deep gorge, 40% more outlaws, and the village witch cursed the last guy who left a dead horse rot near the stream.

    Old men take the two-extra-days detour. That's why they get to be old."

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  • (Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday March 14 2017, @05:10AM (1 child)

    by GDX (1950) on Tuesday March 14 2017, @05:10AM (#478765)

    Apart from what you tell there is also the problem in what is considered "least cost", in the old travel routes it not was uncommon that between two points there where various alternatives routes and that the people selected one ore another in relation to the transportation method and how loaded they where, if they where in a carriage they took one longer route but if they where on feet or riding a horse they used some alternative itineraries that cut time because the cost of this alternatives weren't much higher in practice and the total cost of the travel most of the times was reduced.

    After all the transportation method and the load is crucial to determine the route and its cost but tend to be ignored most of the time.

    • (Score: 1) by GDX on Tuesday March 14 2017, @05:23AM

      by GDX (1950) on Tuesday March 14 2017, @05:23AM (#478769)

      I forgot to mention that the routes sometimes also varied or changed depending of the season.

      All of this about routes is also valid today, specially in the less developed countries but even in the first world countries are examples like the ice roads.