Caravaggio has replaced Michaelangelo as Italy’s top artist.

By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.

That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

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USA Today has posted an interesting article about the fountain found late last year in the Mayan city of Palenque.

Excavations reveal the 217-foot-long, spring-fed “Piedras Bolas” aqueduct underneath Palenque was designed to narrow at its end, producing a high-pressure fountain.  It’s the first example of deliberately-engineered hydraulic pressure in the New World, prior to the arrival of the conquistadors in the 1,500’s. Now eroded, the conduit dates from 250 A.D. to 600 A.D.

“Palenque is unique in that it is a major center where the Maya built water systems to drain water away from the site,” says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois, by email. Most Maya centers stored water in reservoirs for the winter dry season.  ”Palenque, thus, is a unique site; we would not expect to find such water systems elsewhere. That said, there is lots of lit on the different kinds of water systems. For example, all centers with large plazas have drainage systems to keep the plazas dry during rain. “

The conduit lay underneath several households and could have stored water during the dry season, suggest the study authors. Another possibility, the conduit’s flow may have, “created the pressure necessary for an aesthetically pleasing fountain, and perhaps served as an aid in the filling of water jars.”

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The DNA of the extinct Aepyornis has been extracted from ancient eggshells.

“Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to isolate DNA from a fossil eggshell for years,” said Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Western Australia, who authored the research.

“It just turned out that they were using a method designed for bone that was not suitable for a fossil eggshell.”

The team has obtained DNA from the shells of a variety of species, most notably the elephant bird Aepyornis , which at half a tonne was heaviest bird to have ever existed.

Aepyornis looked like an outsized ostrich, standing three metres tall; most of them died out 1,000 years ago.

Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson at the University of Sheffield hopes that an analysis of the bird’s DNA will shed more light on why the bird became extinct.

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A dozen shipwrecks, some of which are unusually well-preserved, have been found at the bottom of the Baltic sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline. [Thx Kristen]

The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, said Peter Norman, of Sweden’s National Heritage Board.

“They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved,” Norman told The Associated Press.

Thousands of wrecks from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn’t have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.

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The first known evidence of double burials, where ancient corpses were ritually dug up, torn apart and reburied, has been found in Mexico.

Indigenous peoples of the Cape Region of Baja California Sur practiced these double burials for about 4,500 years, from about 300 B.C. to the 16th-century A.D, when Europeans first arrived in the region, anthropologists say.

To the native groups, death was “a motionless, painful state, from which the living could free” the dead by sectioning the limbs, physical anthropologist Alfonso Rosales-Lopez said in an email translated from Spanish.”

The double-burial practice, he added, is consistent with beliefs in other cultures around the world that death isn’t the end of life but rather a passing from one state to another.

Since 1991 Rosales-Lopez has examined more than a hundred of the double burials along the southern coast of Baja California and is currently working on a paper describing the practice.

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