“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that
whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical
tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which
puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons
just a century ago).”
posted 10/12/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in
1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has
ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also
seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that
circulate in modern rodent populations.”
posted 9/25/2022 8:00pm ∞
“The lone teenager carrying the toddler cut across that route at a right angle.
At least three times, mammoths crossed the teenager’s trail, obscuring the small
human footprints with their own massive feet. The teenager stepped in some of
those fresh mammoth tracks on their way back south-southeast.”
posted 3/27/2021 9:18pm ∞
“Flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in
bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and
orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues
say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.”
posted 3/25/2021 9:48pm ∞
“Grotte de Cussac [is] the only site from this period where people buried their
dead deep in the interior of a cave (or in a bear nest), mingled the bones of
multiple people, or removed skulls from the dead.”
posted 3/25/2021 9:20pm ∞