in a largely undisturbed state.

So, not Puerto Rico, then. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Fuck it. Disturb the forgotten temple. I don't even care anymore

Cattle glue was found in most of the samples containing animal glue, but there were also glues from several different animals, including sheep or goats, donkeys, horses and possibly wild antelopes. The evidence suggests these were made using animal hides and connective tissues rather than bones alone. Several plant proteins were also discovered.

"Proteomics confirmed the use of glue prepared from the collagen of multiple animals and revealed the presence of plant proteins, including sesame and moringa products, previously undocumented in ancient Egyptian artworks," the researchers said in their paper.
[…]
Because sesame and moringa can be processed for oil, the researchers ran additional chemical tests to check whether the ingredients were plant oils or another product.

The analysis revealed a protein-rich material, with traces of oil present. This suggests the painters were not using pure plant oils but may instead have been using seed cake, the protein-rich material left over after pressing seeds for oil.

Could be they thought she was a witch or changeling? Cold iron has long been thought to block magic.

Kinda makes you think that maybe you shouldn't treat someone so horribly that you believe they will be driven to remain in this world beyond death in order to take revenge upon you.

It was Francis. He hates vampires.

I know what you mean by modern, but it should be asserted that this happened in the modern era

Yeah, the blade on the throat is the same as a stake in the heart...

"This body might come alive, so we're making sure"

If a body reanimated, the blade was supposed to just cut the head off. But the move from actual "just in case" routine decapitation and just putting a blade there is a pretty huge leap.

So yeah, primative, but primative because they were advancing, this was the line between an actual decapitation you believed was required, and a ritual just to reassure everyone we didn't have to keep mutilating every dead body. If modern people started doing it because of legitimate zombie concerns, it would be different.

Long story short: anti-zombie protection

I spent a lot of time in Egypt’s southwest Sahara, and almost any time you encounter bedrock it’s just completely full of little fossils. Clearly that’s because it used to be the sea floor, but being in the middle of the desert and seeing marine fossils everywhere you look is a very fun experience.

It was beauty and wealth standard, seen that there was not to much food , in art they where designing The Best. For having food people needed to move and to arrive to this size means you were someone important that food was brought to you . Women were important. That is way there are sculptures like that.

I usually skip YouTube links, but this was super interesting!

Love Dana Lee!!

FASCINATING, thank you, mate. <3

I'll need to re-read that like 5x to absorb the full meaning, but yeah-- the whole concept of discrete divisional bands upon genetics, sorted in to species, genus, family was always sort of a Linnean convenience and conceit, for sure.

"Clades" of course does some heavy-lifting in a bunch of these cases, but it does seem like... um, overall hard definitions upon genetics and DNA distinctions can be sort of convenience-mechanisms meant for doofuses like me, and not really all that representational about best, appropriate science.

Hahaha, trying to keep a foot in both worlds, and likely failing hard. XD

Evolution Why It Might Be Time to Rethink the Human Family Tree

The way we classify humanity’s ancient relatives is a mess. But there’s a simple fix. By Ian Towle

Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus, and Paranthropus.

Each of these is a “genus,” the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.)

These names dominate how we talk about human origins. But new fossils, advances in genetic analysis, and more rigorous methods for figuring out who’s related to whom show these groupings don’t really reflect the true shape of our family tree.

Is it therefore time to come up with a new way to classify humans and our closely related extinct relatives? As I argue in a new paper in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, the current system is overdue for revision.

Finding family branches

The core problem is the current groups often don’t represent real family branches—what scientists call “clades.” A clade is one common ancestor and every one of its descendants.

There’s a second issue too. Ideally, a genus should also tell us something about the behavior, key traits, or way of life shared by all its member species.

Australopithecus (which includes the famous “Lucy” skeleton) is the clearest case. Large-scale analyses consistently find this genus isn’t a real family branch at all.

The problem traces back to how the genus was originally defined—not by shared ancestry, but by shared lifestyle or appearance. Recent fossils show traits such as brain size and gait, as well as diet and behavior, don’t map cleanly onto the actual family tree.

Distinctive human traits are hard to find

Homo has its own problems. Traits once thought to define our genus, such as large brains, tool use and dietary shifts, and committed full-time land-dwelling bipedalism, have been undercut by more recent discoveries. Species such as Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis (the so-called “hobbit” species) pair small brains and other “primitive” features with traits typical of other Homo species.

It’s now hard to name a single feature shared by all Homo species not also found in some Paranthropus or Australopithecus species. That’s because different body parts evolve at different rates and directions, in what is called mosaic evolution. Traits also tend to evolve more than once, independently, in different closely related lineages facing similar pressures.

What’s more, key behaviors we associate with being human emerged much later than the genus itself did. The earliest members of Homo, as currently defined, include very small-brained species that may even have evolved independently from different Australopithecus lineages. The small-brained, later-surviving species mentioned above may likewise have surprisingly deep, separate roots.

Even Paranthropus, arguably the most physically distinctive of the three, known for its heavy jaws and huge molars, isn’t safe. Those features have long been read as adaptations for eating hard foods such as nuts, but evidence now suggests eastern and southern African species ate quite differently from one another, and neither relied heavily on hard foods.

Some researchers argue the group may not even be a single lineage, but rather two independent regional groups that evolved oversized teeth, meaning Paranthropus would not be a real family branch either, although most researchers today think this group is the most likely to be a genuine clade out of the three.

Taken together, there’s now little anatomical, behavioral, or ecological evidence to justify keeping these three genera.

Why classification matters

This may sound like an abstract semantic question. But when genus names don’t reflect real relationships, they can obscure patterns of descent, overstate differences between groups, and reinforce outdated “primitive versus advanced” thinking. With a fast-growing fossil record and better methods for reconstructing family trees, the gap has become too large to ignore. ALL IN THE FAMILY: Hominin family tree showing the proposed changes to an expanded genus Homo. Dashed lines represent alternative hypotheses for the relationships of these taxa within the broader tree. Credit: Ian Towle, CC BY.

One solution is to fold Australopithecus and Paranthropus into a single, much larger Homo genus, which would represent a real and complete branch of the family tree. This would fix the “not a real clade” problem, align our classification with the way we treat non-human species, and better account for interbreeding between closely related lineages over the past few million years.

Changing the classification would have costs. We’d lose some intuitive distinctions researchers rely on, especially the ecological and physical uniqueness of Paranthropus and later, large-brained Homo.

Language must keep up with understanding

The fossil record seems to be increasingly showing a large, branching burst of evolution beginning around 4 million years ago, with diet, brain size, movement, and tooth size all varying substantially among groups in ways that don’t necessarily map neatly onto their true relationships. A group this large and complex, shaped by migration and repeated rapid bursts of evolution in particular traits and behaviors, is best captured under a single genus.

Our everyday language is changing too. Humans were only formally recognized in recent decades as great apes—in the sense of being placed in the same family as chimps, gorillas and orangutans (Hominidae)—yet “ape” in casual usage still often excludes humans.

Similarly, “monkey” is often assumed to be a genuine evolutionary group, but isn’t. New World monkeys are more distantly related to Old World monkeys and apes than those two groups are to each other. Someone who consistently hears “monkeys, apes, and humans” may reasonably draw wrong conclusions about our evolutionary relationships.

We are therefore in a transition period in how we discuss our place in the primate family tree, both in science and in everyday language. As biology increasingly embraces taxonomy that reflects genuine evolutionary relationships, perhaps it is time for our terminology, and the way we talk about ourselves, to catch up.

Human evolution was messy, with hundreds of sub groups that sometimes had descendants in dozens of other groups. And some of those groups looped back. And, we only have a few partial snapshots at random times and places.

Less a family tree, and more a bbq gathering

Would love to see this summarized or excerpted. Most of my internet's down right now.

I totally recommend it. Peru in general is an incredible place and I feel Lima is kind of looked over in favor of Cusco. I was shocked by how much I liked Lima and I wish we'd had more time to visit on our itinerary.

Man, I would love to go some day. Thank you for sharing!

I was there almost exactly a year ago! We did the night tour and it was fascinating. Crazy how big the place is and how little of it was excavated.

Wow ty

I was recently there! I didn't have a chance to take a tour so I only have photos through the fencing

Apologies, I wasn't trying to critisice, rather share what I'd read! Sounds like a 'let's publish positive/interesting news day'. Each outlet throwing whatever three of a hundred possibilities whilst adding the absurd link by vague geographic location only!

Although far from a sword expert, my first thought was that it didn't look British, at least not from that era. Though a lion's head is a common royal theme so a ceremonial sword sounds more likely, practical weaponry being less fancy in the whole, to my very amateur knowledge at least. Also, who's to say it wasn't thrown in at some point much later even if older than the lake.

I read an article about this sword a few days -ago. By The Guardian maybe? Regardless, that one mentioned the sword had been dated to within the last two centuries, and the picture took forever to load, hilt-first, which is where I got the Scimitar idea ... but yeah, last I head, Excalibur was not supposed to be a tarnished, single-edged, horrifically-un-balanced and blunt-tipped stage-prop.

If you read the article the title quickly becomes click bait nonsense. The lake was dug in the 1800s, the previous owner collected swords & they think it could have been from a Victorian era marching band. Or from WW2 troops that were stationed there. Or anything but excalibur really!