LINKS - March 20th, 2024
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.
Emory primatologist Frans de Waal remembered for bringing apes ‘a little closer to humans’
“Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal — who pioneered studies of animal cognition while also writing best-selling books that helped popularize the field around the globe — passed away March 14, 2024, from stomach cancer.”
Inside the AI Competition That Decoded an Ancient Herculaneum Scroll
By Tomas Weber, Scientific American
“The fields of papyrology and classics are changed forever. Thanks in large part to a group of amateur AI builders, we now have tools for reading the unopened Herculaneum papyri. If the technological advances continue and can be rolled out to the many unopened scrolls, says Tobias Reinhardt, a classics scholar at the University of Oxford who helped to confirm the winning entries, ‘we could see a recovery of ancient texts at a volume not seen since the Renaissance.’”
This Was Village Life in Britain 3,000 Years Ago
By Franz Lidz, The New York Times
“Francis Pryor, a British archaeologist best known for his 1982 discovery of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site one mile from Must Farm, added: ‘The Must Farm report is transforming our understanding of British society in the millennium before the Roman Conquest, 2,000 years ago. Far from being primitive, Bronze Age communities lived in harmony with their neighbors, while enjoying life in warm, dry houses with excellent food.’”
Ancient Iberians Ingested Red Dust Loaded With Mind-Altering Mercury
By Bridget Alex, Smithsonian Magazine
“As they repeated these rites throughout their lives, the poison built up in their bodily tissues. Millennia later, archaeologists measured mercury in the bones of these women and others from their community, revealing values orders of magnitude higher than what health experts consider tolerable today. It seems at this Copper Age site called Valencina, between about 2900 and 2650 B.C.E., ritual leaders intentionally ingested mercury-rich cinnabar for ceremonies or magic. More community members consumed it accidentally, while working with the pigment or through environmental contamination, according to a study published this past November in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.”
The Dissent Hidden in an Iconic Scientific Image
By Gowan Dawson, Nautilus
“Hawkins nevertheless found ways to surreptitiously introduce his own views into the ascending procession of primate skeletons, particularly in his drawing of the gorilla. This ape totters awkwardly on the sides of its feet, giving the impression that it is more likely to fall over than stride toward humanity. The tottering pose was entirely Hawkins’ creation. The skeleton he drew from, which stood in a museum in London, was placed with its feet flat on the ground, and in anti-evolutionary lectures, Hawkins described gorillas as having ‘the most waddling gait imaginable.’ So this iconic image of evolution actually contains, if you know where to look, clear anti-evolutionary messages.”