LINKS - December 7th, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
This May Be The Oldest Fragment of Modern Humans in Europe, Or Something Even Rarer
By Michelle Starr, Science Alert
“A new analysis of the broken mandible reveals that it has nothing in common with other Neanderthal remains. Rather, it could belong to a Homo sapiens – and, since it's dated to between 45,000 to 66,000 years ago, might be the oldest known piece of our species' anatomy on the European continent.”
Who Could Have Possibly Predicted The Bull Testicle Guy Was Juicing?
By Patrick Redford, The Defector
“So why did the fake caveman shtick work so well? I’d posit the appeal of returning to ‘tradition’ (or at least, a deeply stupid revisionist understanding of the concept) only works to the extent that the con artist pushing it can sell a sucker on the shortcomings of modernity. That part is much simpler. People are lonely. All of humanity faces oncoming ecological collapse. The post-war promise of endless growth and a thoughtlessly comfortable American life has been dead for decades, and now scans mostly as a taunt. More than that, the vibes are off—nothing really seems to connect as it’s supposed to, nothing works like it used to, and the only concerted response to any of this has been an avalanche of scams. It’s not great.”
Was Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Amnesia Real or Revenge on Her Cheating Spouse?
By Stefania de Vito, Sergio Della Sala, Scientific American
“On Saturday, December 4, 1926, a green Morris Cowley motorcar stood abandoned in a roadside ditch near the city of Guildford, England. The car belonged to the renowned author Agatha Christie, who had apparently disappeared without a trace. But after missing for 11 days, she turned up in a hotel in Harrogate, a spa town in Yorkshire 200 miles north of Guildford. Christie was unable to explain what had transpired during the intervening time period, nor is this mysterious episode mentioned in her autobiography. Unlike those in her many books, this mystery remains unsolved.”
Oldest Known DNA Offers Glimpse of a Once-Lush Arctic
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times
“The genetic material dates back at least two million years — that’s nearly twice as old as the mammoth DNA in Siberia that held the previous record. And the samples, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, came from more than 135 different species.”
Homo naledi may have lit fires in underground caves at least 236,000 years ago
“Such behavior has not been attributed to H. naledi before, largely because of its small brain. But it’s now clear that a brain roughly one-third the size of human brains today still enabled H. naledi to achieve control of fire, Berger contends.”