LINKS - September 6th, 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.
A Portrait of Tenochtitlan: A 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire
“The world looked very different 500 years ago. As you view these images, imagine the smell of salty air and smoked peppers. Imagine the sound of people speaking Nahuatl, a canoe gliding through the canals, and birds chirping in the trees. Imagine the warmth of the sun on your skin. The people around you are dressed in white cotton and work their fields, cook, trade, and practice their craft in the shade of trees and awnings.”
A New Yorker’s mission to bring longevity secrets from the world’s ‘Blue Zones’ to NYC
“The series is the latest effort from author Dan Buettner to promote the concept of Blue Zones – his trademarked term for a handful of global locales where people are said to enjoy longer, healthier lives. In addition to Okinawa, these zones include Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, a community of Seventh-Day Adventists in California. Buettner’s company, also called Blue Zones, seeks to bring lessons from these areas to cities across the U.S. by helping to implement large-scale public health projects.”
Undying Dread: A 400-Year-Old Corpse, Locked to Its Grave
By Franz Lidz, The New York Times
“Four centuries later, archaeologists in Europe have discovered the first physical evidence of a suspected child revenant. While excavating an unmarked mass cemetery at the edge of the village of Pień, near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń unearthed the remains of what has been widely described in news reports as a “vampire child.” The corpse, thought to have been about 6 at the time of death, was buried face down, with a triangular iron padlock under its left foot, in a likely effort to bind the child to the grave and keep it from haunting its family and neighbors.”
Mysterious ancient stones were deliberately made into spheres
By Michael Le Page, New Scientist
“The finds include nearly 600 stone balls made of flint, basalt and limestone. Similar discoveries have been made at many other early human sites dating as far back as 1.8 million years ago. The objects, known as spheroids, were made by knapping, but why this was done remains a mystery.”
Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago
By Anna Ikarashi, Nature
“Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.”