LINKS - July 12th, 2023
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.
Oregon could be oldest site of human occupation in North America, UO find indicates
By Janet Eastman, The Oregonian/OregonLive
“A pre-historic stone tool unearthed by educators and students at the University of Oregon’s Archaeological Field School suggests that people were living in Oregon 18,000 years ago. That is far earlier than scholars previously thought, and more than 1,000 years before the Clovis culture, once seen as the oldest in the Americas.”
The Human Age Has a New Symbol. It’s a Record of Bomb Tests and Fossil Fuels.
By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times
“The group said it had chosen a lake in an Ontario conservation area to represent the start of Anthropocene epoch, a potential new chapter in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history that could soon sit alongside the Cambrian, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous in marking periods of momentous planetary change.”
What Happens When Catholic Medals Become Mainstream Jewelry
By Emma Cieslik, Sapiens
“For some radically traditional Catholic devotees, Mary medallions symbolize traditional church practices, including gender politics that relegate women to domestic spaces, enforce hyperfeminine dress and behavior, and prohibit women from leadership positions in the church. But the ballooning market for these medals extends beyond radically traditional Catholic companies and customers. Secular retailers have been marketing Mary medals as symbols of female empowerment, and diverse customers are buying.”
How the Brain Creates Your Physical Sense of Self
By Diana Kwon, Scientific American
“Zapping the anterior precuneus caused all eight individuals to report alterations in their subjective experiences similar to what the person with seizures stemming from that region reported. These changes included a feeling of floating, dizziness, a lack of focus and a sense of detachment from themselves. Some participants remarked that the detachment was reminiscent of what they’d felt while on psychedelics. ‘We discovered that by stimulating this particular region, we can cause distortions in our sense of physical being,” Parvizi says.’”
Ozempic was tested on monkeys IUCN listed as endangered. Here’s what we know
By Dina Fine Maron, National Geographic
“Ozempic and Wegovy, medications that have become increasingly popular this year due to their weight loss effects, were both tested on a monkey species listed as endangered, according to a National Geographic analysis of public drug label disclosures maintained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
Read (This story is behind the Nat Geo paywall, but it’s an exclusive to them so I included it this week regardless.)