SoylentNews

Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [nature.com] 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 [arstechnica.com]

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 [doi.org]

Original Submission