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Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
8 forgotten women Egyptologists that history overlooked
Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, is an area of research that was once closed to women. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a few women used their wealth to leave their mark on the field. Their stories were rarely told before a recent book, "Women in the Valley of the Kings." In the late 1800s, it wasn't unusual to see well-to-do Europeans climbing Egyptian pyramids in long dresses or peering into crumbling tombs. Many were tourists, but a few were studying the monuments, part of the burgeoning field of Egyptology. Egyptology, the study of Ancient Egypt, was still developing its scientific methods into the early 20th century. The men who excavated tombs during this period often lacked formal training, sometimes failed to keep detailed records, and typically kept a portion of the treasures they found. It was difficult for women to break into the profession, but a few prevailed. Female Egyptologists then made room for more women to join their ranks. "The way that the women who moved into those positions then kept making things better for women after them is one of the biggest impacts on the discipline of Egyptology," Kathleen Sheppard, a history professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told Business Insider. She's the author of "Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age." These women had much in common. Many were wealthy and unmarried but often had same-sex partners who traveled and supported them throughout their lives. Several were ill and traveled to Egypt for the warm, dry climate. They also took home artifacts before present-day laws made buying and taking home such "souvenirs" illegal. The story of Egyptology's Golden Age, from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 until Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, usually highlights the British, European, and American men who made the discoveries. However, for many of those discoveries, women were there, cataloging the artifacts, making drawings, and doing other valuable work. "They're just not included in these main histories," Sheppard said. "But their impact is very clear," she added. Amelia Edwards blazed a trail for women who wanted to study Egypt and set up a foundation to help them do so. Though she only traveled to the pyramids once, Amelia Edwards had an enormous impact on the study of Ancient Egypt, especially for other British women. Inspired by Lucie Duff-Gordon, an English writer who lived and wrote about Egypt in the 1860s, Edwards traveled to the Giza pyramids, Dendera temple, and other sites for several months between 1873 and 1874. While Duff-Gordon's "Letters from Egypt" were focused on modern Egypt and her experiences there, Edwards was fascinated by the country's ancient monuments and history. In 1877, she published "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," describing her travels up the river and the sights along the way. It was an instant hit, going through several editions and reprints. She described crawling into tombs and temples, occasionally worried about being buried alive in a cave-in. Her lush descriptions of the glittering desert, pink mountains, and misty chasms captured readers' imaginations and spurred many to make their own journeys. With its vivid imagery and rich historical detail, Edwards' book served as a kind of template for Western women travelers, Sheppard said. She told them where to go and the significance of the monuments they would visit. In 1882, Edwards founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, which still exists today as the Egypt Exploration Society. Subscribers would help pay for expeditions and receive detailed reports in exchange. Edwards put women in charge of running the fund, while men did the excavation. When she died in 1892, she left money to the University College London for a department of Egyptology, but there were several stipulations. Some were about who would chair the department — no man above 40 who was affiliated with the British Museum was eligible — while another ensured that women would benefit from her bequest, too. Classes, scholarships, and exhibitions had to be "open to students of both sexes," according to Edwards' will. There was a specific reason UCL received the money, too. "They were the only ones in 1892 who were allowing women to take degrees on equal terms as men," Sheppard said. Margaret Murray created a program that taught generations of excavators. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie spent years excavating important sites in Egypt. For a while, he brought Margaret Murray along to record his findings. "He specifically would bring Margaret Murray out to sites because his handwriting was so horrible," Sheppard said. "So if he tried to catalog anything, no one could read it." Murray would go on to have her own successes in the field. "She had this amazing 70-year-long career because she started in Egyptology when she was 30, and she lived till she was 100, and she was still working when she died," Sheppard said. For many of those years, Murray was training future Egyptologists. She'd been the one to develop the two-year program at University College London and served as the instructor, drawing on her experiences in Egypt. Students learned about geology, mineralogy, history, religion, languages, and more. Some of the students became famous in their own right. "They're known to history, to everybody else as Petrie's pups because Petri trained them in the field," Sheppard said. Yet many acknowledge Murray's influence as well. In 1908, Murray performed Britain's last public unwrapping of mummified remains. It was controversial, even at the time. Letters in the newspaper suggested Khnum-Nakht, the man who Murray was going to unwrap, should be left in peace. Yet 500 people came to watch her at Manchester University as she peeled off layers of linen, which were then given out as souvenirs. For her own research, Murray published an influential report about a structure she said was used for worshiping the god Osiris. Her discredited folklore work on witchcraft has overshadowed her work in Egyptology. Still, her legacy remains thanks to her many students and their followers. "People who are still alive today can trace their academic genealogy back to Margaret Murray in the 1930s," Sheppard said. Maggie Benson was the first woman to officially excavate a site in Egypt. In 1894, Margaret "Maggie" Benson went to Egypt, hoping to ease her rheumatism, which affected her joints and lungs. Like many of the other women Egyptologists, the 28-year-old fell in love with the country, Sheppard said."They go home, and they keep wanting to go back." During her first trip, she went with one of the popular Thomas Cook & Son tours, which took thousands of tourists up the Nile each year, per The BBC. They traveled in comfort and style, with daily excursions to see tombs at Saqqara or Beni Hasan's cliffs. Benson decided she wanted to kickstart her own excavation. There were granite statues sticking out of the earth at the dilapidated Temple of Mut in Luxor. Though Benson had no formal training in archaeology, neither did many of the men who were excavating tombs and temples. It wasn't yet the careful, scientific discipline it would become in the next century. Money was the workaround. "If these women had enough money and if they had enough time, they could go be archeologists too, because that's all that the men had at that point," Sheppard said. Using her connections and supplying her own funding, Benson got permission to excavate the temple, making her the first woman who was officially allowed to do so. Nearly two dozen Egyptian men and boys did the digging and the hauling and sifting of dirt. Benson's brother Fred lent his expertise, having worked on excavations in Athens before. By the end of the first season in 1895, the excavators had dug up dozens of statues, coins, and other artifacts. The next year, they found over a dozen lion-headed statues and countless fragments of others. One of Benson's most important collaborators at the site was Janet "Nettie" Gourlay, with whom she had an intense, long-lasting relationship. Together, they published "The Temple of Mut in Asher" in 1899, "which became a groundbreaking report, revealing the temple as it had never been seen before," according to "Women in the Valley of the Kings." Emma Andrews kept critical records during excavations of significant sites. Today, archaeologists meticulously track the locations of artifacts when they find them, but this wasn't always the case. "In British Egyptology, you have these stories of people going in and using explosives to get through a wall so they can pull out the big statue, and you don't need to record what was on that wall," Sheppard said. Luckily for Theodore Davis, he had Emma Andrews by his side. The two wealthy Americans were in a relationship, though Davis also had a wife. By 1900, they'd been traveling to Egypt for over a decade, often with a copy of Edwards' "A Thousand Miles" in their luggage. Together, they helped fund or excavate 24 tombs. In 1902, Davis received the coveted permission to excavate the Valley of the Kings, where many rulers were buried. It soon paid off, with his team rediscovering tomb 46, which belonged to Yuya and Thuya, Tutankhamun's great-grandparents. Unlike many looted tombs, it still had many of its treasures inside. While Davis marveled over an exquisite chariot or gilded chair, Andrews documented artifacts, drew maps, and kept a list of visitors to the site. These records were crucial because Davis could be slipshod in his own accounts. "Her diaries are the most accurate record historians and archaeologists have for over a dozen tombs," Sheppard wrote. Andrews also wrote about the work the Egyptian men did at the tomb, including much of the physical labor, something often omitted in official reports. In 1908, Davis started excavating a different tomb, KV55. He believed the mummified remains belonged to Queen Tiye and wrote his report based on that incorrect assumption. Archaeologists are still unsure whose tomb it was, though they've learned the body belonged to an adult male. Both Davis and Edwards left money and hundreds of Egyptian artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Winifred Brunton created portraits of Egyptian pharaohs. Two of Margaret Murray's students were Guy and Winifred Brunton. The UCL students were married and spent their lives working at archaeological sites. Together, they worked at Lahun, a site in Faiyum, Egypt, in 1914, alongside Petrie. They found a tomb belonging to an unknown princess from around 1897 to 1878 BCE. Though people had plundered the tomb during antiquity, they left behind several items of jewelry, including a gold diadem adorned with gems. Winifred Brunton was an artist and painted portraits and scenes from the excavations. Some of her best-known works were her Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt. She published books of portraits of Tiye, Nefertiti, Ramesses II, and other rulers. Myrtle Broome and Amice Calverley helped preserve the art of a historic temple. Construction began on the Temple of Seti I, now known as the Great Temple of Abydos, in the 13th century BCE. Ramesses II, Seti I's son, completed the temple to honor the deceased pharaoh. Scenes of the king making offerings to the gods and receiving the symbols of life decorate the walls of the temple's seven chapels. In the late 1920s, it was difficult for photographs to accurately reflect all the nuances of the artwork or inscriptions. To preserve these scenes, Egyptologist James Breasted created a laborious process for creating detailed copies that evolved over the years. Using a lighted tracing board, an artist would trace the lines of the enlarged photograph to pick up as many details as possible. An on-site expert would then compare the drawings to the original to make sure everything was identical. "It's neck cramping," Sheppard said. "It's backbreaking." Amice Calverley was one artist who was very skilled at it. In the late 1920s, she became field director for the Abydos temple project, doing much of the work herself along with help from an Egyptian staff. Fortunes literally changed when John D. Rockefeller Jr. visited and donated the equivalent of over $1 million to the project, Sheppard said. It "was a huge coup in Egyptology at the time," she said, because one of the requirements was that Calverley continue to lead the project. Due to the funding, Myrtle Broome, one of Margaret Murray's first students, joined the team. Together, they eventually published four volumes of "The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos," with their intricate recreations of the scenes. With the onset of World War II, several volumes were left unpublished. Caroline Ransom Williams was the first woman in the US to earn a PhD in Egyptology. Caroline Ransom Williams earned her PhD in 1905 from the University of Chicago, becoming the first woman in the US with an advanced degree in Egyptology. Nearly 30 years had passed since Amelia Edwards published "A Thousand Miles up the Nile." Sheppard said Ransom WIlliams followed her and other female Egyptologists' examples. "All of these women who came before Caroline set up these steps that she could follow along," she said. In 1910, she began working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Art Department. By then, she'd already been a professor in art history and archaeology at Bryn Mawr and spent months traveling in Egypt. One of her most influential projects at the Met was her reconstruction of Perneb's tomb. British Egyptologist Edward Quibell had uncovered it a few years earlier, and Edward Harkness bought it for the museum. Ransom Williams went through over 600 boxes of limestone. She preserved both the stone and its artwork by sealing everything in a varnish-like coating. Prepping and rebuilding the tomb indoors took about three years, and Ransom Williams and her team completed the work in 1916. Visitors can still see the tomb on display today. In the accompanying booklet, Williams explained that the tomb's hieroglyphs said that Perneb's family visited him regularly, helping to personalize the life of someone who had lived over 4,000 years earlier. Drawing on her expertise in art history, Ransom Williams said the artists' use of the Egyptian blue pigment was significant and part of "a sophisticated color scheme." Over a decade after finishing Perneb's tomb, Ransom Williams helped refine Breasted's epigraphic process for capturing scenes and reliefs on tomb and temple walls, which Myrtle Broome and Amice Calverley would use soon after. The combination of the way Ransom Williams' presented Ancient Egypt to the public as a museum curator and her work with the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey made her career one of the most significant in Egyptology at the time. "If she had been a man, we would be talking about her way more than we talk about even James Breasted or Howard Carter because she was so impactful with the work that she did," Sheppard said. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The 'Great Dying' — the worst mass extinction in our planet's history — didn't reach this isolated spot in China
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The mass extinction that killed 80% of life on Earth 250 million years ago may not have been quite so disastrous for plants, new fossils hint. Scientists have identified a refuge in China where it seems that plants weathered the planet's worst die-off. The end-Permian mass extinction, also known as the "Great Dying," took place 251.9 million years ago. At that time, the supercontinent Pangea was in the process of breaking up, but all land on Earth was still largely clustered together, with the newly formed continents separated by shallow seas. An enormous eruption from a volcanic system called the Siberian Traps seem to have pushed carbon dioxide levels to extremes: A 2021 study estimated that atmospheric CO2 got as high as 2,500 parts per million (ppm) in this period, compared with current levels of 425 ppm. This caused global warming and ocean acidification, leading to a massive collapse of the ocean ecosystem. The situation on land is far hazier. Only a handful of places around the world have rock layers containing fossils from land ecosystems at the end of the Permian and beginning of the Triassic. A new study of one of these spots — located in what is now northeastern China —revealed a refuge where the ecosystem remained relatively healthy despite the Great Dying. In this place, seed-producing gymnosperm forests continued to grow, complemented by spore-producing ferns. "At least in this place, we don't see mass extinction of plants," study co-author Wan Yang, a professor of geology and geophysics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, told Live Science. The finding, published Wednesday (March 12) in the journal Science Advances, adds weight to the idea that the Great Dying was more complicated on land than in the seas, Yang said. Yang and his colleagues looked at rock layers in Xinjiang that span the mass extinction event. A major advantage of this now-desert site is that the rocks include layers of ash that hold tiny crystals called zircons. The zircons include radioactive elements — lead and uranium — that gradually decay, which enables researchers to determine how long it has been since the crystals formed. This means the researchers can more accurately date the rock layers here than they can at other sites. Some of these layers also hold fossil spores and pollen. These fossils reveal that there wasn't a massive die-off and repopulation but a slow changeover of species, Yang said. This is consistent with other evidence from Africa and Argentina, where plant populations seemed to have shifted gradually rather than dying off dramatically and then repopulating, said Josefina Bodnar, a paleobotanist at the National University of La Plata in Argentina who was not involved in the research. Land plants "have a lot of adaptations that allow them to survive this extinction," Bodnar told Live Science. "For example, [they have] subterranean structures, roots or stems, that can survive perhaps hundreds of years." Seeds can also persist a long time, she added. This survival may have been particularly possible at humid, high-latitude regions. The site in Xinjiang was once dotted with lakes and rivers, a few hundred miles from the coast. Other places where plant refuges have been found, such as Argentina, were also high-latitude in the Permian, far from the equator where temperatures were the hottest. Yang and his colleagues found that during the late Permian and early Triassic, the climate became a bit drier in what is now Xinjiang — but not enough to cause deforestation. This may have been a consequence of location, said Devin Hoffman, a researcher in paleontology at University College London who was not involved in the new study. Marine animals had no escape from global ocean acidification. But climate change on land wasn't uniform. The impact would have been most pronounced in the center of Pangea, which was a vast desert. This means that in more temperate regions on land, survival could have been possible, Hoffman told Live Science. "You essentially have everything being pushed toward the poles and towards the coast, but on land you're able to escape some of the effects," he said. These findings have led to some debate over whether the greatest mass extinction ever deserves the moniker on land. "I will call it a crisis on land. I will not call it an extinction," said Robert Gastaldo, an emeritus professor of Geology at Colby College who was not involved in the new study, but who has collaborated with Yang in the past. RELATED STORIES —The five mass extinctions that shaped the history of Earth —How the Great Dying set the stage for the dawn of the dinosaurs —Fearsome saber-toothed giant dominated at dawn of 'Great Dying', but its reign was short-lived The end-Permian extinction is particularly interesting to scientists because it was driven by greenhouse gases, much like climate change today. The situation was far more extreme then: The polar ice caps melted completely — a situation that would cause sea levels to rise a staggering 230 feet (70 meters) today. But humans may be nearly as deadly as giant volcanoes. A 2020 study, for example, found that a smaller extinction event at the end of the Triassic (201 million years ago) was driven by greenhouse gas pulses from volcanoes that were on a similar scale to what humans are expected to emit by the end of this century. Studying these ancient catastrophes can give us a sense of what to expect under atmospheric carbon dioxide levels people have never experienced, Gastaldo said. "The planet has experienced it," he said. "The planet's memory is in the rock record. And we can learn from the rock record what happens to our planet under these extreme conditions."
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The remote locale that shielded plants during Earth's biggest mass extinction
During a cataclysmic mass extinction event, there are typically not many places to hide. However, a region of the mountainous Turpan-Hami Basin in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in Western China may have been an oasis for some living organisms during the planet's largest mass extinction. The spot may have served as a refugium–or life oasis–for terrestrial plants during the end-Permian mass extinction, when 80 to 90 percent of life on Earth was wiped out about 252 million years ago. These new findings are detailed in a study published March 12 in the journal Science Advances and challenges some of the views that land-based ecosystems saw the same major losses as marine environments during this incredibly turbulent time in our planet's natural history. During the end-Permian mass extinction––also called the Great Dying–80 percent of marine species were wiped out. While most species on land did not fare much better, the scope of terrestrial impacts has been debated by scientists. One prevailing theory suggests that massive volcanic eruptions in present-day Siberia triggered widespread devastation on land through wildfires, acid rain, and toxic gases. The extinction of Gigantopteris plants in South China and across the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland around 252 million years ago helps bolster this argument. [ Related: Mega El Niños helped kill 90 percent of life on Earth. ] However, another theory argues that latitude and atmospheric circulation may have limited the effects of acid rain, wildfire, and toxic gases in certain regions. Some fossils suggest that some Mesozoic plants even existed before the mass extinction event, which could be evidence of uninterrupted evolution. In this new study, a team of scientists from institutions in the United States, Tibet, and China used fossil evidence of a terrestrial plant community that appears to have remained largely intact throughout the extinction event. This allowed the plants to continuously evolve and recover from any losses more quickly. The team looked at the South Taodonggou section of the Turpan-Hami Basin in Xinjiang. They used detailed analysis of fossil pollen and spores and a new geological dating method developed by Missouri University of Science and Technology geologist Wan Yang. From this dating technique and fossil analysis, it appears that the riparian fern fields and coniferous forest here continually thrived from 160,000 years before the extinction event began until 160,000 years after it ended. 'The presence of intact tree trunks and fern stems further confirms that these microfossils represent local vegetation, not transported remnants,' Mingli Wan, a study co-author and paleobotanist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGPAS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. While some plant species did disappear locally, the team found that the overall extinction rate of spore and pollen species in South Taodonggou may have been only 21 percent. This percentage is significantly lower than the marine extinction rate during the same period, which saw about 80 percent of life wiped out. According to the team, this stable base of vegetation was crucial for the local ecosystem's recovery. Fossil evidence shows that this area was home to numerous tetrapods, small four-limbed vertebrates that include today's living amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The region was home to a plant eating tetrapod called Lystrosaurus and carnivorous chroniosuchians, which shows that the food web became more complex fairly quickly. The new evidence suggests the area recovered more than 10 times faster than in other regions of the world. The area's stable, semi-humid climate may have been the reason behind this great biological resilience. South Taodonggou consistently received about 100 millimeters of rainfall per year, which helped build abundant vegetation and a more habitable environment than other regions after the end-Permian mass extinction. All of this plant life offered vital support for migrating animals. Its proximity to the volcanic activity that triggered the end-Permian extinction also allowed the Turpan-Hami Basin shelter for crucial biodiversity. 'This suggests that local climate and geographic factors can create surprising pockets of resilience, offering hope for conservation efforts in the face of global environmental change,' Feng Liu, a study co-author and paleontologist at NIGPAS, said in a statement. According to the authors, the current concerns about the planet entering another mass extinction–one driven by human activity–highlights the importance of identifying and protecting areas like this that could protect life.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Pandemic Did Not Affect The Moon After All, Scientists Say
Can a global pandemic affect temperatures on the Moon? A 2024 study linked worldwide lockdowns with a drop in heat radiation reaching the Moon from Earth – but now scientists say that wasn't actually what was going on. Here's the original hypothesis from last year: As businesses closed their doors in 2020 and we all spent more time at home, carbon emissions dropped and there was a drop in terrestrial radiation – the heat being generated by our planet, and taken up by the Moon. Previous research has raised the question of terrestrial radiation influencing lunar surface temperatures – and indeed there was an observed drop in Moon nighttime temperatures across April and May 2020, when many lockdowns were in force. In the latest study, researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) and the University of West Indies (UWI) wanted to take a closer look at the data – and found some problems with the link between COVID-19 and lunar temperatures. "The idea that our activity, or lack of activity, on Earth would have significant influence on the temperatures of the Moon – which is almost 240,000 miles from us – didn't seem likely, but we decided to keep an open mind and conduct additional research," says civil engineer William Schonberg from Missouri S&T. Looking at the data, the researchers found some problems with the original hypothesis. First, there was a dip in lunar temperatures in 2018 similar to the one in 2020, and a steady decline from 2019 – which doesn't quite fit in with the timing of the pandemic and its lockdowns. In fact, the temperature readings gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest cyclical fluctuations rather than one distinct dip, according to the updated analysis. The researchers also point to a 2021 study which found that any emissions reduction linked to COVID-19 only affected the lower parts of Earth's atmosphere. "We're not disputing that the temperatures did go down at different times during the time frame studied, but it seems to be a bit of a stretch to state with any certainty that human activity was the primary cause of this," says Schonberg. The researchers behind the new study also raise the possibility that fewer pollutants and a clearer night sky would actually increase the heat being reflected back from Earth to the Moon – potentially raising rather than reducing lunar temperatures. There are of course a multitude of factors at play here, but the conclusion of the new study is that shifts in human activity are unlikely to have an impact on the temperatures on the Moon – during COVID-19 or any other period. "During the Moon's nighttime, there is a small possibility that heat and radiation from Earth might have a very small effect on the lunar surface temperatures," says Schonberg. "But this influence would probably be so minimal that it would be difficult to measure or even notice." The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. Scientists Simulated Bennu Crashing to Earth in September 2182. It's Not Pretty. At 1.3 Billion Light-Years Wide, Quipu Is Officially The Biggest Thing in The Universe Hubble Reveals Cosmic Bullet That Gave The Bullseye Galaxy Its Record-Breaking Rings
Technical.ly
06-02-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Eagles and Chiefs have already made Philadelphia and Kansas City economic winners
This is a guest post by Michael Davis, associate professor of economics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. A version of this article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. If you live in the Philadelphia or Kansas City metro areas, congratulations: The fact that your city made it to the Super Bowl translates to about $200 extra in your pocket. That's right — whether the Philadelphia Eagles or the Kansas City Chiefs win the big game on Feb. 9, both cities have scored an economic victory. Research shows that making the playoffs alone is enough to boost personal incomes in the region. And if your team wins, you and your city will get an even bigger boost. This windfall isn't coming from increased merchandise sales, as you might expect. Instead, the key driver is happiness. A successful season lifts fans' moods, which leads – indirectly – to greater spending and productivity. Why winning pays I'm a macroeconomist with an interest in sports economics, and my colleague Christian End of Xavier University is a psychologist who specializes in fan behavior. Together, we published two studies combining our areas of expertise: ' A Winning Proposition: The Economic Impact of Successful NFL Franchises ' and ' Team Success, Productivity and Economic Impact.' In a study using data from the late 20th century and early 21st century, we found that when a team goes from zero to 11 wins – the typical number needed to make the playoffs – its home region sees an average per-person income rise by about US$200 over the year, adjusted for inflation. We also found that winning the Super Bowl was associated with a $33 bonus, again adjusted for inflation. When you multiply $200 by the 6 million people who live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and the 2 million in the Kansas City region, it comes out to a whole lot of money overall. It's about happiness, not jerseys If you've ever been to a Super Bowl parade, you might assume that the income boost is linked to people spending more on team-related merchandise. But research shows that professional sports teams usually have a small impact on local incomes. Even hosting the Super Bowl doesn't seem to do that much: Our research shows that people are better off economically if their local team wins the Super Bowl than if their local area hosts one. So if people aren't spending more directly on the team, something else must be going on. Our work pointed to two possible explanations – both having to do with happiness. First, we hypothesized that happier people tend to spend more. And when people spend more, that money is returned to the population through wages, so people's incomes rise. The key here is that people are spending more on everything, not just things associated with the sports teams. Since the football season usually finishes in December, it could be that happy parents who are fans of the local NFL team are spending more on Christmas gifts for their kids. With the Super Bowl stretching later into the winter, loved ones might get nicer flower bouquets and more chocolate for Valentine's Day when the local team wins the Super Bowl. The other possible path is through increased productivity. Psychology research has found that happier people are more productive. So as the season progresses and the home team keeps winning, it stands to reason that people in the area will go into work happy and work harder. Previous research backs up this idea. For example, a 2011 study found that when the home team in Washington performs better, federal regulators are more productive. In places where private businesses dominate the local economy – which is to say, most of the rest of the U.S. – an increase in productivity would lead companies to be more profitable, which could lead to locals having higher earnings. Even nonfans see benefits when their neighbors are happier, spending more and working harder. No matter how the Super Bowl turns out, both the Philadelphia and Kansas City metropolitan areas have already won, as both fans and nonfans in each region stand to benefit from higher incomes.
