Oct 27, 2021 10:07 PM
Genomic study of the Tarim Basin mummies in western China reveals an indigenous Bronze Age population that was genetically isolated but culturally cosmopolitan
https://www.mpg.de/17737592/1022-evan-or...s-150495-x
INTRO: Researchers have determined the genetic origins of Asia's most enigmatic mummies. Once thought to be Indo-European speaking migrants from the West, the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies are revealed to be a local indigenous population with deep Asian roots and taste for far-flung cuisine... (MORE)
The Bizarre Cultural History of Saliva
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-b...erapeutic/
EXCERPTS: . . . Pliny the Elder praises the therapeutic powers of human saliva in his “Natural History” (Book XXVIII, vii). Not only is it the best of all safeguards against serpents, he says, but daily experience teaches that many other advantages attend its use...
[...] The healing powers of oral secretion kept their good renown throughout history. Albert the Great (Latinized name, Albertus Magnus: 1193–1280), regarded by some as the greatest theologian and philosopher of the Middle Ages, extolled the medicinal properties of human saliva ... further proof of the wondrous salivary virtue lies in the observation that wet nurses use their own saliva to cure the newly born of all sorts of cutaneous inflammations, furuncles, and impetigo by rubbing the lesions with their spittle. And he quotes the reports of Arab physicians who affirm that, once mixed with mercury, its therapeutic powers are so greatly enhanced that a victim of the plague may be saved by simply inhaling the mixture’s emanations.
As late as the middle of the 19th century, we find the therapeutic prestige of saliva undiminished. Nicholas Robinson, an English medical author who signs his book simply as “A physician,” extolls enthusiastically the virtues of saliva, which he calls a “recrement.” This word, [...] meaning ... “the superfluous or useless portion of any substance,” and is still employed, however rarely, to designate the dross, the unessential.
Our medical author, however, points out that recrements are to be distinguished from excrementitious discharges; the latter are thrown out of the body and are of no further use to it, whereas the former serve many necessary purposes in the life of the organism. Saliva, like pancreatic juice and other fluids, is one of these indispensable “recrements.” But the three “grand recrements of the body are the saliva, bile, and seed,” he writes, for not only do they preserve life and health in the individual, but the last named is “that sacred balsam that has continued the species from the beginning of the world to this time, and which will so continue it to the latest period of nature.”
[...] The fact that saliva is being constantly produced must have engendered in some people the feeling that they needed to rid themselves of some of it by ejecting it forcefully, wherever they chanced to be. This perception was so prevalent that the spittoon, or receptacle for spittle, also known as “cuspidor” (from the Portuguese cuspir, to spit), became a very common presence. Those of us who grew up in the first half of the 20th century remember that spittoons were obligatory in bars and taverns, and frequently found in stores, banks, railway carriages, waiting halls, hotels, offices, and many other sites...
[...] The perceived urge to expel saliva manifested anywhere, regardless of the availability of spittoons. In consequence, the custom of spitting on the floor became widespread. ... ygienic and biomedical considerations were the chief factors that put a stop to the habit of spitting on the floor. Tuberculosis was a scourge that devastated European populations throughout the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Weighty scientific studies and international meetings of experts concluded that the abolition of floor-spitting, and of public spitting in general, by reducing the risk of spreading the airborne bacilli, would stave off the progress of tuberculosis...
[...] Today’s medical scientists, it must be owned, do not share this kind of salivary enthusiasm. Still, the observation that all animals instinctively lick their wounds, and that wounds in the oral mucosa (for instance, after a tooth extraction) heal much faster than those of skin or other sites, led researchers to suspect the presence of a healing principle in saliva. Indeed, a number of beneficial substances were already known to exist there, such as antibacterial and antifungal compounds, and factors that promote blood clotting, but those that speed up the healing of wounds remained elusive for a long time. It is of no small interest that researchers have of late identified some, such as epidermal growth factor (EGF), histatins, and leptin.
[...] Although lacking the fervor of Albert the Great, or the hyperbolic enthusiasm of the 19th-century advocate of the matutinal “fasting spittle,” present-day investigators have been sufficiently impressed by the bactericidal effects of saliva to wonder whether being licked by pet dogs might be, after all, a clean and salutary practice. Not so, they concluded after due investigation: The bacterial flora in the saliva of animals is radically different from that of humans. Therefore, beware: Amorous effusions from man’s best friend may pass on to you exotic infections worse than any you could get from a similarly demonstrative fellow human being.
Fortunately, the human salivary defense mechanisms identified are so numerous that they now outnumber the digestive factors. Saliva contains immunoglobulins; lysozyme (actually a family of so-named powerful enzymes which damage the cell walls of bacteria); mucins that protect the oral mucosa and cause selective adhesion of potentially harmful bacteria and fungi; plus a growing array of antibacterial peptides; all these are constituents of an impressive and effective barrier to infectious agents in saliva.
There is little doubt that important, new therapeutic agents will be found in saliva. At the present time, however, the main interest of biomedical experts focuses on its diagnostic potential. This fluid is increasingly recognized as a “mirror” or a “window of the state of the body,” whose analysis promises to become more informative than that of urine or even blood samples in many conditions... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.mpg.de/17737592/1022-evan-or...s-150495-x
INTRO: Researchers have determined the genetic origins of Asia's most enigmatic mummies. Once thought to be Indo-European speaking migrants from the West, the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies are revealed to be a local indigenous population with deep Asian roots and taste for far-flung cuisine... (MORE)
The Bizarre Cultural History of Saliva
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-b...erapeutic/
EXCERPTS: . . . Pliny the Elder praises the therapeutic powers of human saliva in his “Natural History” (Book XXVIII, vii). Not only is it the best of all safeguards against serpents, he says, but daily experience teaches that many other advantages attend its use...
[...] The healing powers of oral secretion kept their good renown throughout history. Albert the Great (Latinized name, Albertus Magnus: 1193–1280), regarded by some as the greatest theologian and philosopher of the Middle Ages, extolled the medicinal properties of human saliva ... further proof of the wondrous salivary virtue lies in the observation that wet nurses use their own saliva to cure the newly born of all sorts of cutaneous inflammations, furuncles, and impetigo by rubbing the lesions with their spittle. And he quotes the reports of Arab physicians who affirm that, once mixed with mercury, its therapeutic powers are so greatly enhanced that a victim of the plague may be saved by simply inhaling the mixture’s emanations.
As late as the middle of the 19th century, we find the therapeutic prestige of saliva undiminished. Nicholas Robinson, an English medical author who signs his book simply as “A physician,” extolls enthusiastically the virtues of saliva, which he calls a “recrement.” This word, [...] meaning ... “the superfluous or useless portion of any substance,” and is still employed, however rarely, to designate the dross, the unessential.
Our medical author, however, points out that recrements are to be distinguished from excrementitious discharges; the latter are thrown out of the body and are of no further use to it, whereas the former serve many necessary purposes in the life of the organism. Saliva, like pancreatic juice and other fluids, is one of these indispensable “recrements.” But the three “grand recrements of the body are the saliva, bile, and seed,” he writes, for not only do they preserve life and health in the individual, but the last named is “that sacred balsam that has continued the species from the beginning of the world to this time, and which will so continue it to the latest period of nature.”
[...] The fact that saliva is being constantly produced must have engendered in some people the feeling that they needed to rid themselves of some of it by ejecting it forcefully, wherever they chanced to be. This perception was so prevalent that the spittoon, or receptacle for spittle, also known as “cuspidor” (from the Portuguese cuspir, to spit), became a very common presence. Those of us who grew up in the first half of the 20th century remember that spittoons were obligatory in bars and taverns, and frequently found in stores, banks, railway carriages, waiting halls, hotels, offices, and many other sites...
[...] The perceived urge to expel saliva manifested anywhere, regardless of the availability of spittoons. In consequence, the custom of spitting on the floor became widespread. ... ygienic and biomedical considerations were the chief factors that put a stop to the habit of spitting on the floor. Tuberculosis was a scourge that devastated European populations throughout the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Weighty scientific studies and international meetings of experts concluded that the abolition of floor-spitting, and of public spitting in general, by reducing the risk of spreading the airborne bacilli, would stave off the progress of tuberculosis...
[...] Today’s medical scientists, it must be owned, do not share this kind of salivary enthusiasm. Still, the observation that all animals instinctively lick their wounds, and that wounds in the oral mucosa (for instance, after a tooth extraction) heal much faster than those of skin or other sites, led researchers to suspect the presence of a healing principle in saliva. Indeed, a number of beneficial substances were already known to exist there, such as antibacterial and antifungal compounds, and factors that promote blood clotting, but those that speed up the healing of wounds remained elusive for a long time. It is of no small interest that researchers have of late identified some, such as epidermal growth factor (EGF), histatins, and leptin.
[...] Although lacking the fervor of Albert the Great, or the hyperbolic enthusiasm of the 19th-century advocate of the matutinal “fasting spittle,” present-day investigators have been sufficiently impressed by the bactericidal effects of saliva to wonder whether being licked by pet dogs might be, after all, a clean and salutary practice. Not so, they concluded after due investigation: The bacterial flora in the saliva of animals is radically different from that of humans. Therefore, beware: Amorous effusions from man’s best friend may pass on to you exotic infections worse than any you could get from a similarly demonstrative fellow human being.
Fortunately, the human salivary defense mechanisms identified are so numerous that they now outnumber the digestive factors. Saliva contains immunoglobulins; lysozyme (actually a family of so-named powerful enzymes which damage the cell walls of bacteria); mucins that protect the oral mucosa and cause selective adhesion of potentially harmful bacteria and fungi; plus a growing array of antibacterial peptides; all these are constituents of an impressive and effective barrier to infectious agents in saliva.
There is little doubt that important, new therapeutic agents will be found in saliva. At the present time, however, the main interest of biomedical experts focuses on its diagnostic potential. This fluid is increasingly recognized as a “mirror” or a “window of the state of the body,” whose analysis promises to become more informative than that of urine or even blood samples in many conditions... (MORE - missing details)