“Translated, the inscription reads, ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair
and the beard.’ … This purpose was confirmed when the authors searched for
evidence of head lice on the comb under a microscope and found some remains on
the second tooth, still in the nymph stage of development.”
(See also the discussion at Language
Hat .)
posted 11/23/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Over the next 1,500 years, during especially hot summers, the remains and
artifacts were partially exposed, which explains the deterioration of the most
exposed parts of the body and additional damage to the artifacts. Eventually,
around 3,800 years ago, snow and ice finally sealed off the gully until the
discovery of the mummified remains in 1991.”
(Ötzi was a recurring interest of my old @sben_links account on Twitter, the
predecessor to this microblog. If I had completed my long walk in
2017 , I would have passed through the next valley east
from where he was found, and would have certainly stopped by his
museum when the trail passed through Bolzano.)
posted 11/22/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[T]he Iron Age sample also had a high abundance of two species of fungi:
Penicillium roqueforti — commonly used in the fermentation of cheese — and
Saccharomyces cerevisiae , used for fermenting bread and alcoholic beverages
like beer, mead, and wine.”
posted 8/16/2022 8:00pm ∞
“The reverberation time lasted about 0.6 seconds inside [Stonehenge’s]
circle for mid-frequency sounds—ideal for amplifying human speech, or the sounds
of musical instruments like drums.”
posted 3/26/2021 9:48pm ∞
“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant
involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the
plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a
broken protein.”
posted 11/3/2022 8:00pm ∞