Researchers studied the remains of 25 individuals for clues.

Little is known about what life was like for Mongolians during the Bronze Age. The period has long been shrouded in mystery because of a lack of artifacts and settlements, and consequently, it’s been difficult for archaeologists to understand how Mongolians developed and thrived back then.

In a recently published study in the journal HOMO, a team of researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C, and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences attempt to unravel a bit of this mystery. The researchers examined the skeletal remains of 25 individuals from khirigsuurs (ceremonial mounds) in the Hovsgol administrative subdivision of northern Mongolia. These bones date back to approximately 3,500 to 2,700 years ago.

According to the researchers, the remains showed little signs of infectious and diseases associated with malnutrition, such as rickets, osteomalacia, scurvy, or generalized osteoporosis. The study suggests that disease may have become more widespread with later generations of Mongolians due to demographic and cultural shifts. However, these Mongolians lived in small groups, rarely settling in one location which kept communicable diseases at bay.

But life wasn’t always peaceful. One of the male remains showed various signs of injury due to interpersonal conflict. Sharp perimortem injuries, such as cuts or other wounds that occur at the time of death, were found on the skeleton along with signs of blunt force trauma.

The bones also provided additional insight into when Mongolians took to horseback. Schmorl’s nodes, which occur when the soft tissue of a spinal disk pushes into nearby vertebrae, were found on the remains. This condition is common with old age and degeneration of the spine, but it’s also associated with horseback riding. The remains were also found to have several traumatic injuries consistent with falling from horses and other animals, potentially from attempts to domesticate.

“The timing of the introduction of mounted pastoralism has been something that researchers have been trying to pin down due to the wide-ranging implications for shifts in culture, trade, warfare, and sociopolitical organization,” says Sarah Karstens, lead researcher on the project, in an email. The discovery of these nodes gives scientists some evidence that perhaps this is the period where Mongolians began to work with animals and ride horses.

Karstens says that the sample size was too small to draw any grandiose conclusions, but she notes that the various injuries and patterns of degenerative changes are consistent with what happens to modern horseback riders. She further explained that this period is where we begin to see a cultural identity being formed in Mongolia, “In terms of the nomadic pastoral lifestyle, ceremonialism, and the cultural significance of animals.”

While there’s still much to learn about Bronze Age Mongolia, we now know more about what they ate and how they developed as a society. Scientists are also getting closer to knowing when animals, horses in particular, became vital to the Mongolian way of life.

Things quickly get contentious.

Islands are tricky things. They’re hard to define. (Must they always be surrounded by water? What about ecosystems isolated on tops of mountains?) They’re also hard to count. (What, if anything, is too small to make the cut? Is anything too large to be added to the tally?) There is no single, constant, definitive number of islands in the world, and there never will be: New ones continue to form, and old ones disappear from view, drowned by rising water or other factors.

The cartographer David Garcia has been mapping islands for years, and still finds fresh inspiration for new projects. Garcia’s latest effort is a roundup of the 100 largest islands on the planet, depicted in shaded relief.

To sort islands by size, Garcia used the Equal Earth Projection, which maintains' areas relative sizes as a way to minimize distortion. Garcia then calculated islands’ areas based on data available through the OpenStreetMap project. Since the idea was to show a general public how the islands stack up next to each other, Garcia explains, “I oriented all islands to the same cartographic north, but to visualize each island, I used a projection that depicts how the island looks like on a standard globe.” The 3D effect is based on a NASA dataset, and the hues reference elevation and nod to each island’s climate. (Polar regions, for instance, are a shivery blue.) Greenland, the heftiest of the huge, is at the top left, and the Solomon Islands’ Guadalcanal, the smallest of the big, is toward the bottom right.

Garcia began thinking deeply about islands and mapping in 2013, while working as a geographer and planner in the Guiuan islands, in the Philippines, after Typhoon Haiyan (often called Super Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines) swept through in 2013. The island group had seen “colonization, crises, conflict, and climate change,” Garcia says, “and my cartography is seriously committed to such concerns.”

Mapping islands takes on a personal significance, too, when Garcia thinks about his ancestors sailing "from island to island, using maps that are different to those that were taught to me in university," or when Garcia made maps of the largest islands in the Philippines to give to friends and mentors as parting tokens before departing for London to study geospatial analysis.

Mapping has also led Garcia to chew on how indigenous names can be lost to time and records. On this new map, Garcia has labeled some islands by their indigenous names—Greenland is noted as Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenlandic, for instance.

In a lively Reddit thread about the chart, some commenters were surprised to see that Java was so big, while another thought it would be bigger, given how many people call it home. (The island's population topped 140 million in 2015.) Many mourned the absence of Australia, which Garcia omitted because of its status as a continent. Some mused about how strange and frustrating it was that there were so many parts of the world that they didn’t spend much time thinking about. “It shows how people’s values, expectations, learning experiences, etc. are a factor in how places are classified and named,” Garcia says.

Next up, Garcia wants to make a map of the islands of the Pacific that face threats from climate change. And, continuing to think about movement of people and ideas, “[maybe] I should work more about geography and relationships—instead of boundaries, territories, and isolation,” Garcia says. No matter how you slice them, islands aren’t just landmasses lapped by water—they’re places that change and are changed by the world beyond their shores.

For nearly 40 years, this loss has accelerated at a devastating clip.

In the fall 0f 2018, we learned that climate change was proceeding at an even more alarming rate than we had thought. The United Nations’ disturbing October report, which warns of a crisis by 2040, is reinforced by new research demonstrating the harsh acceleration of Antarctic ice loss since 1979: By 2017, Antarctica was losing more than six times as much ice per year as it did nearly 40 years prior, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Between 1979 and 1990, the researchers explained in a release, Antarctica lost, on average, about 40 billion tons of ice per year (or 40 gigatons, if you prefer). That’s not exactly slim, but it hardly compares to Antarctica’s average annual ice loss between 2009 and 2017, which weighed in at more than 250 billion tons annually. The researchers, from the University of California, Irvine, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, say that the four-decade study is the longest analysis of Antarctic ice mass ever conducted. They looked at a total of 18 regions comprising 176 basins, plus some additional surrounding islands.

To gather the data, the team used aerial photos from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, taken from a height of about 350 meters, along with Landsat satellite images dating back to the 1970s. The team also used satellite interferometry data, taken by measuring the surface with beams of light. These tools helped the researchers compare levels of snowfall against ice discharge at glacial “grounding lines,” the spots where ice detaches and starts floating in the ocean. With over 250 billion tons of Antarctic ice now sliding into the ocean every year, the researchers say sea levels will only continue to rise beyond the levels already observed in the nearly 40-year analysis. During that time, they rose by more than half an inch.

Another key finding from the study reveals the role of East Antarctica’s Wilkes Land sector in these decades of ice loss. Consistently, said UC Irvine’s Eric Rignot in the release, this area has made major contributions to the ice loss and is thus “probably more sensitive to climate [change] than has traditionally been assumed …” That’s particularly problematic looking ahead, as Wilkes Land, for now, contains more ice than West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula combined.

The study coincides with another report, also published today in Nature Geoscience, that illustrates the Antarctic ice sheet’s vulnerability to melting. According to a release, the ice sheet—“the largest single mass of ice on Earth”—could raise sea levels by about five meters if melted.

During a drought, wood-eating insects can be a jungle's best friends.

Termites get a bad rap in the housing industry, but a recent study shows that they play an essential role in rain forests by buffering them during periods of drought.

“Only about three percent of termite species are pest species,” says Kate Parr, an ecologist and leader of the Funky Ant Lab at the University of Liverpool. Most of them serve critical ecological roles. Parr collaborated with the Natural History Museum of London to study what termites do for tropical environments such as Malaysian Borneo old-growth rain forests. It is known that they break down organic material, but no one knew the broader extent of their ecological functions.

When the study began in 2014, “we were going around supermarkets in Malaysia with trolleys piled high with toilet paper, getting crazy looks from people,” says Parr.

Cellulose-rich toilet paper is like termite junk food, and makes excellent bait. Researchers used the toilet paper to attract and poison termites so they could create areas with fewer termites than regular, healthy rain forest. They also broke down and removed the termite mounds in those areas. “It was pretty hard work,” says Parr. “You’re going through this patch of rain forest where there are millions of termites, breaking down their mounds and rolling them downhill.”

When an El Niño drought struck the rain forests in 2015 and 2016, many plant and microbial species suffered. But termites thrived. They took over for the microbes usually responsible for turning the soil, and because different termite species have different palates—some like to eat wood, while others prefer leaf litter or even soil—they can create a richly varied nutrient quilt that promotes plant diversity.

The drought conditions also made it clear that termites help rain forests retain their water. Soil moisture in plots with termites was 36 percent higher than in those with suppressed termite populations. “In effect," Parr says, "termites are acting as an ecological insurance to help us get through these stressful periods.”

In 1919, a viscous 40-foot wave slammed into the city's North End, killing 21 people.

On January 15, 1919, 10-year-old Pasquale Iantosca went out to gather scraps for firewood. Although it was a warm day, his father, Giuseppe, was taking no chances: He had bundled his son into two crimson sweaters, and was keeping an eye on him from the second-story window of their small apartment building in Boston’s North End. But peril is not predictable, and as Giuseppe watched, Pasquale suddenly vanished. “A dark wall had consumed him as though he never existed,” the historian Stephen Puleo writes in Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. It would be hours before rescuers found the boy’s body, his arms and pelvis broken and both of his red sweaters gummed with brown.

The Great Molasses Flood was a tragedy. Twenty-one people died horribly, 150 were injured, and homes and buildings were destroyed. But it has become tragic in the Greek sense, too: The thing that makes it most memorable also undercuts it. The only mark it has left on the landscape is a brief plaque embedded in a wall near Boston Harbor, describing a “40-foot wave of molasses” that, like some sort of delicious Godzilla, “crushed buildings” and “buckled … railroad tracks.” The sight and smell of “brown syrup and blood,” so memorably described in the Boston Post, has been replaced in the city’s consciousness by a charming “scent of molasses” that supposedly still permeates the North End on hot days. As Puleo puts it in Dark Tide’s introduction, “the flood today remains part of the city’s folklore, but not its heritage.” The punchline takes away the punch.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Great Molasses Flood has plenty of lessons to offer at all levels: about corporate responsibility and negligence, about immigration and disenfranchisement, and about human bravery and suffering. One hundred years after the molasses tank burst, some people are trying to restore the disaster to its rightful place in Boston history.

If you haven’t heard about the Great Molasses Flood—or if you’ve only gotten the online-video version—a quick primer is in order. In the 1910s, millions of gallons of molasses were being shipped into Boston Harbor from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the West Indies, all property of a company called United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA). As World War I picked up in Europe, it spurred demand for molasses, which was distilled into alcohol used to make dynamite and other ammunition. USIA needed somewhere to store the sticky stuff before it got carted off to their distillery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so they decided to build a steel tank four stories high. They put it smack in the middle of Boston’s North End, a community made up largely of Italian immigrants, and at the time one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire country.

The tank was made in a rush, and poorly constructed. It needed to be recaulked constantly; even still, it sprung enough leaks that a supervisor had the sides painted brown to camouflage the drips. Children would sneak over and carry the excess out in pails. One maintenance man, Isaac Gonzalez, was so panicked about the tank bursting that he would run from his home in the middle of the night to check on it.

On that January day, Gonzalez’s nightmare finally came true. A few days before, a massive molasses shipment had arrived. The tank was already more than half full of the stuff, and the new batch, warmed slightly by its journey along the Gulf Stream, had been poured on top. The mix of warm and cold sludge in the tank sped up the normally slow process of fermentation, which increased gas pressure. Around lunchtime, it blew. Millions of gallons of molasses rushed out of the tank at 35 miles per hour, engulfing the entire neighborhood. “Ensnaring in its sticky flood more than 100 men, women, and children; crushing buildings, teams, automobiles, and street cars—everything in its path—the black, reeking mass slapped against the side of the buildings,” wrote the Post. “Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells, and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat.”

It took weeks to clean the molasses off the streets, and months for the harbor to lose its brown tinge. Mopping up the legal implications took even longer. Eventually, judge Hugh W. Ogden found USIA liable for the disaster—“really the first ruling against a major U.S. corporation,” says Puleo. Although most people don’t know it, Puleo adds, “all the building construction standards that we’re used to today … all of that is a direct outgrowth of the molasses flood case.”

Puleo has been writing and talking about the Great Molasses Flood for over 15 years. His book, Dark Tide, remains the definitive account of the disaster. When asked how he managed to paint such a vivid picture of the event, he recalls immersing himself in pages upon pages of victims’ statements from the court case. “You read about the doctors and nurses … trying to get the molasses out of the breathing passages of these poor victims,” he says. “It made it so real for me. I think the descriptions kind of flowed naturally.”

He then hears himself and backtracks: “No pun intended! I did not intend that pun.” Puleo has a good sense of humor, but being a caretaker for this particular piece of history has put him on high alert. “Had this been fire or flood or famine or pestilence or whatever, I think it probably would have been better known,” he says. “But there is that initial giggle, right, when you say ‘molasses.’”

When people hear that word, they get… well, stuck. “It’s misremembered [as] something out of Willy Wonka, when in reality this was an explosion in an ammunitions plant,” says Gavin Kleespies, the Director of Programs at the Massachusetts Historical Society. (The cognitive dissonance this creates is such that there is a Snopes page to assure curious Googlers that the flood did, in fact, happen.) Peter Drummey, the librarian at MHS, agrees: “[There’s] this idea that this is something that is, if not comical … an industrial disaster that you can essentially have as an event suitable for children,” he says. “Even though there were children killed in it.”

This is especially ironic, Puleo says, because the event was so grounded in reality. “Almost every major issue that the U.S. was dealing with 100 years ago touches the flood story in some way,” he says, from munitions production for World War I to the Italian anarchist movement (which USIA tried to blame for the blowup, and which would be involved in, and accused of, a number of other bombings in the years to come).

While his book ties these threads together, the MHS hopes to help push these efforts even further, into the present day. Starting in January 2019, they’re hosting a series of panel discussions related to the flood. (Puleo is on all three of the panels.) The talks are meant to break the molasses flood out of the “weird history” category, and to help the city instead “think of this as we think about other important historical events,” says Drummey. One panel, for example, will be about issues facing immigrants, both past and present.

“Part of the reality of the North End [in the early 1900s] was that it was a high percentage of noncitizen immigrants who didn’t have political muscle. That’s part of why this dangerous [tank] ended up near them,” says Kleespies. “I think it’s worth taking a look today and saying—where are disadvantaged groups now? And what are they facing that we should be conscious of?” Some people are forging these connections on their own: Last year, after a series of natural gas explosions rocked the Merrimack Valley in northeast Massachusetts, killing one person and displacing struggling families, someone linked the Wikipedia page about it to the entry for the Great Molasses Flood.

It’s easier to learn from the past if there are visible reminders of it. In 2014, the civil engineer Brian Webb was living in the North End—right near the scene of the explosion, which he learned about in a city planning course. He would look across the street, picture his neighborhood drowned in molasses, and wonder why he hadn’t been made to think about all this a little earlier. “It’s the second-most disastrous event in Boston history”—after the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, which killed 492 people in 1942—“and all we have is a little plaque,” he says. “And this is Boston! You know how important we view our history and our city [to be].”

So when the Massachusetts Department of Transportation announced that they were accepting proposals from the public on how to use some spare land just outside the North End, Webb decided to propose what he calls The Great Molasses Flood Memorial. “My idea was to take the dimensions of the tank and kind of cut it in half and make an arch,” he says. There would be paths, ponds, and picnic lawns spilling out of it and spreading around. The north side of the structure would house a small historical exhibit, including a stone wall carved with the victims’ names. The whole thing could double as an amphitheater.

Webb started pitching his idea at planning meetings in 2014, and eventually worked up an official plan. Although he says people reacted enthusiastically, the city didn’t bite. At the moment, the land in question still sits empty, and a MassDOT representative says there are "no active conversations taking place now on the possible future use of [the] land."

“I would like to get this going again,” Webb, who now lives in San Diego, says. “I think the 100-year anniversary is probably the last time that people are really going to be like, we should really remember this somehow.”

While you’re waiting on a proper memorial, there are a few places you can go. All of the people who perished in the Great Molasses Flood are buried in cemeteries in and around Boston. (Pasquale is at Saint Michael, in Roslindale.) Maureen Keillor, a historian living in Georgia, has put together a list of their graves. She was motivated by both empathy and incredulity: “It’s just impossible to conceive of what that had to have been like,” she says. “If you think about being killed by molasses—how horrible would that be?”

Leave those last moments aside, though, and the rest of their lives are more imaginable. “These are very ordinary people who died,” says Puleo. “Eighteen of the 21 [victims] were Irish city workers and Italian immigrants. You won’t have heard of them. You won’t hear of them again.” In Dark Tide, Puleo connects the fraught historical status of the molasses flood with the obscurity of its victims. “In a city defined by so much compelling and pivotal history … perhaps it is difficult to make room for an event in which ordinary people were affected most,” he writes. But if a dark wall already consumed them once, maybe we can keep it from happening again.

The creature is said to be the source of the iconic Scottish dish.

Has a haggis ever run wild and free?

If you believe a haggis is an iconic Scottish dish of sheep's stomach stuffed with spiced innards and oatmeal, then no. But one humorous theory posits that the haggis's source is not the sheep, but rather, the wild haggis: a creature with four legs and a shaggy mane.

Legend surrounds the wild haggis. According to many cryptid directories, the wild haggis is an unbalanced beast whose legs of unequal length enable it to lope up steep Scottish hillsides with ease. (According to a mock academic paper on the subject of ultrasounds for wild haggi, this allows "haggs" and their hagglets to "graze along the steep mountain slopes towards the rising sun and move through the heather.")

Physical depictions of the wild haggis vary, but one museum has a "specimen." In a taxidermy display at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, there is a lone wild haggis. Shaggy and short-legged, it is displayed beside a prepared haggis for comparison, and a plaque declares that this is the Haggis scoticus.

Of course, the fuzzy and fascinating wild haggis is not real. Instead, it belongs to the fake-animal pantheon that includes jackalopes and drop bears: a creature of tall tales trotted out to to test the credulity of tourists. While the origin of the wild haggis is lost to time, one early ode to the wild haggis wasn't even written by a Scot. In the January 2, 1924, edition of the New York Tribune, the satirical poet and journalist James J. Montague penned several stanzas describing a mythical hunt for a bearded, vicious haggis:

My heart's in the Highlands, twa strings on my bow

To hunt the fierce haggis, man's awfu'est foe.

And weel may my bairn ha' a tear in his ee.

For I shallna come back if the haggis hunts me.

Montague's words seem to have stuck. In the British Isles in 2003, the press had a field day when a haggis company surveyed 1,000 American visitors to Scotland and found that a third believed in the wild haggis. In 2014, the Visit Scotland website posted a joking "reveal" of blurry footage, showing a swiftly scurrying, hedgehog-like haggis.

Those interested in owning their own wild haggis can purchase stuffed animals of the creature or haggis-summoning whistles. Soon, though, on January 25, haggis-lovers will enjoy the dish at Burns Night celebrations around the world. In honor of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, his admirers display a haggis to the tune of bagpipes and recite the famed poem Address to a Haggis. In the poem, Burns remarks on the haggis's cheerful visage ("Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face"). But he makes no mention of the wild beastie of the Highlands.

Newly stable countries are hotspots for wilderness protection.

There are not many truly unknown places left on Earth, places where nobody knows who and what lives there, where the waterways go, or how the ecosystems operate. Eastern Angola is one of those places, and that helps explain why this place, which has little to no potential for agriculture, oil, development, or resource extraction, now finds itself with a number of suitors aspiring to protect it.

This huge chunk of land, slightly larger than the state of Tennessee—flat, sandy, littered with unmapped and uncrossable waterways that sometimes change locations, like staircases in Hogwarts—could be well on its way to becoming a national park. The land is sparsely populated and fairly inhospitable; the Portuguese called it “the land of hunger” and “the land at the end of the world.” But the provisional name for the developing park is Lisima Lwa Mwondo, “the source of life” in the Bantu dialect spoken there.

Over the next few years, as development and outside interests—humanitarian, capitalistic, political—continue to move into Angola, there is a rush for the do-gooders to preserve the environment. If they wait or fail, they believe, these areas, preserved to some extent by conflict and neglect, may never be the same.

“Our history, in terms of war, is just one after another,” says Adjany Costa, an ichthyologist and conservationist who has spent most of her life in Luanda, the capital of Angola. From the years before the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975 all the way until 2002, Angola suffered through successive and sometimes overlapping civil wars that can seem to blur into one long, brutal conflict. This history makes it, incredibly enough, one of the most talked-about hotspots for conservation over the past half-decade.

Angola’s civil war was political rather than ethnic, with multiple entities, some of which have become political parties since the conflict’s end, fighting for control of the young country after independence. Over time, various foreign powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, South Africa, China, and Cuba—funneled arms, intelligence, and soldiers into the country to further dubious Cold War goals. The war itself is far too complicated to explain here, but it was an incredibly bloody and destructive conflict that killed more than half a million people, displaced a million more, and destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure.

The east-central and southeastern section of Angola, including the province of Cuando Cubango, was home to Jonas Savimbi, who led the U.S.-backed UNITA faction. UNITA, now a political party, draws its support from this region, and at times the place can feel almost like an independent country. Costa says that when she was growing up in the city, the remote area felt separate, out of reach—distant and different. “It didn’t exist in my mind,” says Costa. “Everything else outside Luanda was just a vague geographic region that did not actually exist.”

The region that may become Lisima Lwa Mwondo is Kalahari sand interspersed with rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, flooded areas that may or may not be there in a month or a year. The area lacks the oil and diamonds Angola is known for, and the sandy ground is incapable of growing anything beside cassava and millet. “Literally it's a forgotten place,” says Costa. “Nobody goes there. Even people from the province don't go there.”

Costa ended up there on a trip with the National Geographic Society in 2015, led by Steve Boyes, an ornithologist from South Africa. They were attempting to find the source of the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in neighboring Botswana. (Disclosure: National Geographic flew the author to Botswana to see the Okavango, but is not involved in this story.) Following the rivers and streams north, they ended up in this wild chunk of Angola, where they found some incredible stuff: dozens of species new to science, and populations of endangered animals, including cheetahs and African wild dogs. They also figured out at least the beginning of how the strange, unmappable Okavango Delta works: Huge amounts of peat store water from various rivers before spilling out onto massive floodplains, like a water balloon filling and bursting, again and again. “It's a water tower, it's a carbon sink, it's a sanctuary for biodiversity, and then we find that there are elephants coming into the landscape,” says Boyes. “So the conservation value is clear.”

“The model now, since 2010, has been that all of the easy conservation areas with stable governments have been created,” says Boyes. The opportunities for large-scale conservation are in the unstable, but not-too-unstable, places. It’s obviously not advisable to attempt to establish a national park in a country with an ongoing conflict, so all sorts of competing interests, including NGOs, conservationist groups, developers, and multinational corporations, bide their time. Countries immediately post-conflict, within a decade or two, are ideal. They’re just stable enough so that you know who to talk to, but not so stable that their governments are uninterested in outside help.

“They are often opportunities because the conflict has caused some rural depopulation and prevented some of the real large-scale land conversion; that tends to leave a lot of the habitat relatively intact, at the cost of great human misery,” says Chris Holtz, the vice president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s Earth for Life program, which aims to create networks of protected areas. Holtz has worked in Cambodia and Colombia, among other places, but without prompting he brings up Angola as one of the countries best suited for this kind of post-conflict conservation work.

Each country and region has its own challenges, including destroyed infrastructure, a lack of training and personnel to manage conservation areas, a general dearth of scientific research, and corruption. Costa mentions one park that was so poorly mapped that it’s border doesn’t technically close. “All of them [the parks in the region] are poorly managed, there's no money to invest in any of them and they're all lacking infrastructure, they're lacking people to work there, they're lacking law enforcement, they're lacking processes and protocols,” she says. There’s also lack of traditional knowledge due to internal displacement. Over the course of just a generation, people have forgotten how to live on the land without destroying it. One of Costa’s jobs is to simply talk to the old people to find out those sustainable secrets to nutrition, medicine, and survival.

Angola has its own wrinkles, namely in its history and attitude. Its civil war wasn’t simple; it was Ludlum-esque, full of espionage, paranoia, and suspicion that have carried over.

Now, competing groups of researchers, scientists, do-gooders—another wave of foreigners with their own agendas—have swept into the country. Costa says that there isn’t opposition to the conservation plan, exactly, beyond usual political power struggles, but the sense of wariness is palpable. “Having ten people interested in the same thing, automatically the president goes, ‘Okay, there's something happening here. What are you looking for? What is happening?’” The perfectly defensible impulse of the Angolan authorities is to say, "Shut this all down until we figure out exactly what game you people are playing here."

But there isn’t really time for that. Even though the area isn’t rich in extractable resources, development is knocking and neglect is a concern. Angola is the second-largest producer of oil in Africa, and despite insane governmental corruption during the latter stages of the war (billions of dollars were, according to various reports, simply stolen), that hasn’t gone unnoticed. China has lent billions to the country, with an eye on those oil reserves, and the Angolan government has proven ambitious, if not incredibly successful, at large-scale infrastructure projects, including railways, highways, and airports. The section of the country Costa is trying to protect isn’t likely to see drilling, but without protection, it could suffer from agricultural and developmental pollution, poaching, and more.

Costa, in between finishing her Ph.D. and conducting field research, is the Angola project director for the effort to get the land protected, working with the National Geographic Society and the Angolan government. The process is phenomenally complex. She and the team will have to convince the provincial governor, several ministers, the entire parliament, and the president that protecting this land is the right thing to do.

She is staging, effectively, a public relations and lobbying campaign that will appeal to each tier of the government, catering to exactly what they want and need, and make that somehow not contradict what the advocates are saying to everyone else. They have to get the public on board, too, to further pressure elected officials. (They’re doing that with a series of Portuguese-language nature films, designed for an Angolan audience.) They have to figure out how to incorporate the people who live in the area as well and overcome innate institutional suspicion with a fully-realized plan that addresses every need, even if they’re in conflict.

They also have to make the case that they, meaning the National Geographic Society, are the right people for the job. Costa says that various other groups have been sniffing around this region, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan NGO, the WWF, Space for Giants, and others. Their interest, like that of National Geographic’s, is both altruistic and selfish. All want to see the land protected, but they also want to be the ones to do it, and say they’ve done it.

There are compelling arguments on the side of these groups in general. “Post-conflict countries often want to show that they're rejoining the society of nations, they're back to being normal again,” says Holtz. “Making some big statements around nature conservation, that doesn't do it by itself, but it helps.” The biggest argument, of course, is financial. The promise of ecotourism is strong. Ethical travelers, explorers, and scientists will want to come in greater numbers. They will want to be led around by Angolan guides, they will want to stay in nice Angolan safari resorts, they will want to spend lots of money in Angola. The region, despite being marginal and difficult to traverse, is beautiful, packed with a density and variety of animals that can make it feel like a children’s book. Think an elephant browsing next to a giraffe while a herd of zebras rumble by, with impalas bounding across a river full of hippos.

The National Geographic Society already has a foot in the door, having filmed and released a documentary, Into the Okavango, about Costa and Boyes’s trip through the region. They have a television channel, scientists on the ground, influence, and outreach. The model for this kind of development is probably Costa Rica, which weathered spasms of political violence and is now a stable, thriving ecotourist destination. Tourism brings billions of dollars into the country each year, and is the driving force for its economic success. Could Angola be next?

The next step, which should happen soon, is the signing a protocol of cooperation between the National Geographic Society (and the Wild Bird Trust, Boyes’s foundation) and the Angolan Ministry of the Environment. “In my opinion, by mid–next year [2019], we’ll have something drafted and ready to go,” Costa says. That’s an incredibly fast progression, by design, because the greatest risk lies in waiting too long.

Our heads are spinning.

The Presumpscot River is a 25.8-mile-long waterway that flows through Westbrook, Maine. And it’s now host to the small city’s newest attraction. Though the river has been a transportation corridor for years, people are not crowding the shore to watch a barge float past—they’re there to see the giant ice disk.

This naturally occurring, perfectly round rink of ice looks man-made, but it’s not. Robert Mitchell, owner of a nearby office building, noticed the peculiar disk on the morning of January 14 and promptly notified the city, in hope that they’d be able to get a drone’s-eye-view. “On first look I thought it looked like a cool shape had formed, but after a minute or so I realized it was rotating,” he says.

This rare phenomenon, a frozen Lazy Susan if you will, is not without precedent. In 2017, a family hiking in the Adirondacks discovered a similarly perfectly round (though much, much smaller) ice bog, and were stunned by their good fortune. These ice disks result from a perfect storm of flow and changing water temperatures, but the rotating happens when they begin to melt. A 2016 study published in the journal Physical Review E used a “particle image velocimetry technique” to investigate the water below ice disks. Through their research, they found that the flow of meltwater goes downward and also moves horizontally to form a vortex, and “any vertical flow that generates a vortex will induce the rotation of a floating object.”

According to eyewitness Mitchell, the formation “looks like a perfectly formed disk spinning at a consistent, counterclockwise rotation.” Apparently, it stays firmly centered on its axis, making it look “mechanized,” he says. Another onlooker, web developer Doug Bertlesman, estimated that the disk is roughly 100 yards in diameter, in an interview with the Portland Press Herald. The icy frisbee has also been changing in size and color, depending on the temperature, the time of day, or the sun’s position. “For example, this morning the disk was larger and more opaque,” Mitchell says. “[But] this afternoon it is smaller and more clear in color.”

Ducks have reportedly been seen sitting on the rare, rotating platter, and it’s a pity we can’t ask if they’re getting dizzy.

A new exhibit explores the impact trade had on both cultures through artwork and artifacts.

During the medieval period, between the 8th to 16th centuries, West Africa was flush with vast resources and gold. Its kingdoms were some of the most prosperous the world has ever known. When the king Mansa Musa of 14th-century Mali made a stop in Cairo, Egypt, it’s said that he handed out so much gold to the poor that he single-handedly caused mass inflation.

The riches of Africa were no secret to Europe. Much of the gold and ivory medieval Europeans used to cast religious relics, statues, and jewelry came directly from West Africa.

A new exhibit coming to The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University explores this important historical relationship. Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa features artifacts from West and North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. These items highlight the economic hubs that were the African kingdoms, but also shows how those kingdoms influenced Europe and vice versa.

“One of the things we find most exciting about this project is when you're in the presence of objects from the past, what a powerful experience that is,” says Kathleen Bickford Berzock, associate director of curatorial affairs at the Block. “These objects really put us as close as we can possibly come to knowing and touching a time that's very, very distant from us and how that activates our ability to imagine and understand a time.”

Below are a few selections from the upcoming exhibit.

Biconical Bead, circa 10th-11th century

These beads were created as jewelry by artisans from the Fatimid dynasty. Their power stretched from North Africa all the way to the Hejaz, in what is now Saudi Arabia. With their capital in Cairo, the dynasty was a close trading partner with the Byzantine Empire, a relationship that influenced the design of Fatimid jewelry.

The Crucifixion, circa 1350–59

This religious scene was part of a portable triptych. The artist utilized gold-leaf stenciling techniques to mimic the texture of chainmail worn by soldiers. It's an example of how gold from West Africa was being used widely across the Mediterranean and Europe, says Berzock.

Page From the "Blue" Qur'an, circa 9th-10th century

The Kufic script on this indigo-dyed parchment was written in gold, a technique called chrysography. It’s possible that this style was directly inspired by the illuminated manuscripts of the Byzantine Empire. It also resembles decorations on the mihrab (a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the direction of prayer) at the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Spain.

Virgin and Child, circa 1275–1300

This Virgin and Child statue, carved from ivory, hails from the Gothic period in France. According to the museum, the carving could only have been made from the tusk of an elephant roaming the Savannah. This coincides with a resurgence in ivory sculpting in Italy and France, says Berzock. The details here were also finished with gold.

Tada Figure in Style of Ife, circa 13th-14th century

Created in the Ife kingdom of southwestern Nigeria, this figure was important to spirituality in Tada, a small village located within the kingdom. It is likely that the raw copper from which it was crafted originated in France.

The sausages are worth saluting, but look better in person.

Plenty of belly-warming, taste-bud-pleasing bites aren’t especially easy on the eyes. No matter: Detroit’s chili-drenched coney dogs and Berlin’s ketchup-drowned currywursts slide down the gullet with no problem. The deliciousness is in the taste, not the look of the thing. Even if this newly minted commemorative coin, honoring the 70th anniversary of Berlin’s processed-meat marvel, isn’t doing the street eat any aesthetic favors, the hulking brown lumps, ruddy ooze, and grinning cook are giving a hometown hero its due.

The coin, served up by a mint called Staatliche Münze Berlin, is an ode to the meat dish and the woman who invented it. Herta Heuwer is said to have concocted the sliced-up bratwurst seasoned with paprika, tomato ketchup, sweet peppers, and curry powder in September 1949, with ingredients from British soldiers stationed nearby. She hawked the affordable concoction from a stand in the Charlottenburg district, and hungry passersby quickly developed a taste for it. (Competing origin stories place the invention elsewhere, but Berlin put up a commemorative plaque marking Heuwer’s sizzling spot on the corner of Kantstraße & Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße and cementing the intersection's place in the annals of gastronomic glory.)

Wherever it was first diced and doused, Germans are still hungry for the sausage: The onetime director of the Deutsches Currywurst Museum, which boasted “sniffing stations,” ketchup-squiggle ceiling decor, and weiner-shaped sofas before shuttering in December 2018, has said that Germans devour roughly 800 million currywursts each year. The no-fuss food is iconic. “If Warhol had been a Berliner,” Time Out Berlin once wrote, “he would have painted a bratwurst drenched in lurid red ketchup and liberally sprinkled with curry powder.”

The medallion is on sale for €13 and isn’t legal tender. It was designed by a trainee engraver who drew upon "historical inspirations," says Andreas Schikora, head of the Staatliche Münze. Schikora expects the 2,500-coin run to be gone by the time the World Money Fair, a coin and currency festival, kicks off in Berlin in February. So, if you want to put your money where your mouth is, better do it soon.

Hawkers are retiring without successors, taking classic dishes with them.

Lunchtime, 12 p.m. Hordes of office workers stream out of air-conditioned glass buildings in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District toward Amoy Street Hawker Centre. There, they wait in snaking queues at rows of stalls, each operated by a hawker who often specialises in just one dish, such as char siew (Cantonese barbecued pork) or rojak (an assorted fruit and vegetable salad dish, doused with a sweet and spicy peanut sauce). The smell of spices, fried garlic, and caramelized meat mingles with the dark aroma of kopi tarik (sweet and rich pulled coffee), and the sounds are a melody of conversation, noodles being stirred, and hurried chops of the cleaver.

Singapore has often been described as a food paradise, and its hawker centres, of which there are more than 100, are the city-state’s most visible symbol of its highly democratic culinary scene. Tourists and visiting chefs head to the street markets to feast on Singaporean foods, whose multi-ethnic influences reflect the population: Peranakan Chinese, South Indian, and Malay. But with a plate of chicken rice costing around $3, hawker fare is a staple diet for a majority of Singaporeans—affordable, accessible, and delicious.

Despite this celebration of hawker food by both locals and visitors, beloved dishes are in danger of disappearing, threatening a crucial part of local culture and identity. Experienced hawkers are in their twilight years, and are retiring without passing their knowledge and skills to a successor.

Hawking first became a popular career option in the 1950s and 1960s, during Singapore’s post-war years, as it provided informal employment for residents during a time when jobs were scarce and the city was poor. By the end of the 1960s, roughly 24,000 hawkers, selling delicious and affordable street grub, were feeding a population of 1.7 million.

But the unregulated expansion of hawking led to hygiene and congestion issues. Hawkers roved open spaces and streets, selling home-cooked wares. The combination of diverse offerings—Javanese tempeh, Cantonese congees, Teochew porridges—that could be obtained instantly made them popular. But one such area, Ellenborough Market, which was called Teochew Market due to hawkers in the area, was razed by a fire in 1968, and food poisoning cases were common.

The government intervened, grouping hawkers in designated wet markets, or pasars in the Malay language. The open-air buildings, with individual stalls and designated sitting areas, became known as hawker centres. By the mid-1980s, the roughly 140 hawker centres across Singapore had become an institution. The number of hawkers continued to grow, as did their renown. In 2016, Chan Hon Meng’s soya chicken rice, which costs less than three dollars, earned him a Michelin star. But ask any Singaporean, and they’ll gladly debate which stall sells the best hokkien mee (wok fried prawn noodles) or laksa.

When Singapore’s hawker scene first developed, the city was in the process of rapidly transforming from a manufacturing hub to a well-functioning, cosmopolitan city. Decades of booming growth have since created millionaires (and inequality), an enviable skyline, and a pricey real estate market, making the continued existence of world-class food for three dollars a minor miracle. But the contradiction may not be able to last much longer.

One major threat to hawkers is competition from mall food courts—even though their offerings are less appealing. Unlike in hawker centres, where the food is typically cooked by self-employed stallholders, food court staff are hired, temporary, and given few training opportunities. But Singapore is a city so hot and humid that Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime prime minister, described air conditioning as the most important factor in the country’s growth. Shopping malls are curated for comfort and convenience—one can shop for groceries, enjoy an afternoon kopi, and find fusion burritos, all under one climate-controlled roof.

Yet the greatest challenge is that fewer cooks are taking up the hawker trade, which is an increasingly expensive proposition. The government owns the centres and auctions off leases for open spaces, with popular areas going for a premium. But after outbidding others, new hawkers have to compete with veterans, who pay less for their real estate—a legacy of the intervention that moved hawkers off the streets and into markets in the 1960s. Given the opportunities provided by Singapore’s economic growth, younger generations are also deterred by the long hours, physical demands, and less-than-desirable pay.

Consider the simple kaya toast found at Ah Seng Hainam coffee, an institution tucked away in Amoy Street Hawker Centre. The locale has been serving a Hainanese-style local breakfast since the 1950s, which typically includes kaya toast, two soft boiled eggs, and Nanyang coffee. After 60 years, owner Wong Ah Loke still insists on making breakfast the traditional way. He and his wife go to the stall at 4 a.m. every day to set up a charcoal fire, using the embers to warm up toast and heat the coffee percolators. While they no longer roast their coffee beans, they still make kaya from scratch, mixing coconut milk, eggs, sugar, and pandan leaf to make the distinctive green jam. Along with other touches, such as the charcoal embers, and the coffee style of mixing robusta beans with margarine, sugar, and maize, this is why customers keep coming to their stall.

If new owners take shortcuts, critical facets of hawker culture will be chipped away. KF Seetoh, founder of the hawker food guide Makansutra, laments that “new hawkers are hard to find, few and far between.” Already several dishes, such as Cantonese loh kai yik (stewed chicken wings) and the Hainanese yi buah (sweet glutinous rice cakes, with coconut fillings), are in danger of dying out. “More food will disappear as skills are lost,” says Seetoh, who notes that new hawkers want to sell what’s easy, focusing on quantity over quality. ”It’s about business today, not dedication and passion.”

The Singapore government is conscious of the threats to hawker culture. Earlier this year, Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, announced a bid to make hawker centres places of protected cultural heritage under UNESCO. Other initiatives aim to educate the younger generation and attract them to the hawker trade. There are also calls for a new hawker centre management model that reduces capital costs for hawkers and is oriented around their role providing affordable meals to the public.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Singapore—other cities, such as Hong Kong, are seeing street market culture disappear. But hawkers have long been symbols of resilience. Wong is optimistic that future generations will continue their traditions, even if they tweak their practices to adapt with the times. “As long as one does [one’s work] well and continues to persist,” he tells me, “traditions and skills will continue to be preserved and passed on.”

New findings in Jordan indicate that they've been assisting us for nearly 12,000 years.

In the Near East, humans may have domesticated dogs as many as 14,000 years ago, during the Epipaleolithic period. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but it came at great cost to small prey including hare, according to a new study in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

The study, by archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen and University College London, looks at animal bones found in a Neolithic settlement known as Shubayqa 6, established 11,500 years ago, in the Black Desert of northeast Jordan. The bones suggest that the site’s residents were using their dogs to help them hunt, a finding that can help clarify the murky origins of dog domestication. It hasn’t been clear, the researchers write in a release, whether that process was deliberate or accidental, but this new evidence of canine-assisted hunting implies that these Stone Age humans were highly dependent indeed on their dogs.

At Shubayqa 6, the evidence for a hunting partnership between humans and dogs, who would've been more similar to wolves at this point than the domesticated canines we know today, is written in the bones themselves. The remains bear “unmistakable signs of having passed through the digestive tract of another animal,” said lead author Lisa Yeomans in the release, and some are larger than anything even the most determined humans could shove down their gullets.

At the same time, the researchers also found that the remains of small prey—mostly hare, but also some fox—began to appear much more frequently around the time that dogs arrived at Shubayqa 6. The two developments seem linked, as it’s possible that the dogs helped the hunters refine their methods. Before using dogs, the hunters may have relied more heavily on imprecise methods like netting—less effective than setting packs of hungry canines onto a hare’s bushy tail. The researchers also established that people occupied Shubayqa 6 year round, meaning that the dogs wouldn’t have simply been prowling around on their own, and further supporting the theory that humans were intentionally using these dogs to hunt.

Number 6 isn’t the only part of the Shubayqa area in northeast Jordan to bear significant evidence of our developing knack for harvesting food. In July 2018, researchers published their analysis of the oldest bread ever found, at a site known as Shubayqa 1. The crumbs predate the advent of agriculture. Just as the hare remains can change our understanding of the history of canine domestication, the bread offers new insight into the domestication of cereal grains.

In 19th-century America, cultural anxieties led to groups where fat was fun.

On a bright August day in 1884, a group of men gathered near Long Island Sound. They arrived in boats that nearly capsized, wagons pulled by heaving horses, and streetcars where no room was left for conductors to walk between the rows. It was the annual clambake of the Connecticut Fat Men’s Club.

In the New York Times, a journalist reverently wrote of the club's president, “Mr. Dorlon is huge, he is ponderous, his obesity borders on the infinite, and the most hardened lean man cannot gaze upon his magnificent proportions without being unconsciously made purer and holier.” The event chef, “an artist in clams” from Brooklyn, baked 60 bushels of clams atop hickory logs (that is between 6,000 and 24,000 clams, depending on what kind was being cooked). Also on the menu were “wagon loads of happy Spring chickens, boat loads of cheerful lobsters, and crates of green corn and vegetables.” The whole lot was covered in seaweed and slow-cooked for hours.

Upon conclusion of the feast, there was a weigh-in, followed by a final speech by Dorlon, who, holding the club’s ceremonial golden staff with the weights of his presidential predecessors inscribed on it, wept at his comparative slenderness and offered to relinquish his presidency to a worthier, more weighty representative. He was unanimously re-elected.

The Connecticut club was no anomaly. At the time, fat men’s clubs—cheery celebrations of excess, where members rejoiced in each other’s weighty presence over elaborate meals—sprung up all over the East Coast. Kerry Segrave, in his book Obesity in America, 1850-1939: A History of Social Attitudes and Treatment, explains that the clubs existed alongside contradictory discourses around obesity. While some commentators decried the mental and physical degeneration that they alleged was caused by obesity, other accounts venerated the good spirits and utter lack of criminality among the generously endowed.

The general tenor around plumpness seemed to oscillate between viewing fat men as upstanding leaders of society enjoying wealth and social status, and regarding them as freaks to be fetishized at carnival sideshows. Fat men were considered virtuous, good-natured, and morally upright. Or, as an 1877 editorial in the New York Times, which Segrave cites, unkindly described the clubs’ members: “The fat man is a mystery to himself, and his vague groping after his correct solution are shown by his practice of associating himself with other fat men in clubs, and performing Herculean feats of public overeating.”

But the clubs appeared unconcerned by the debate, or even motivated by it. New York was evidently bulging with fat men’s clubs, and may have had the first such organization in the Fat Men’s Association of New York City, formed some time in the 1860s. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle archives mention the Fat Men’s Association of Coney Island, whose annual ball was quite the shake-up. All fat men’s clubs events featured a weigh-in, with pigs given out as prizes to the heaviest members. News reports describe members stuffing pillows under their vests and coins in their pockets in desperate bids to tip the scales.

Conspicuous consumption was not the only abiding diversion at these clubs. Another New York Times piece from 1885, titled “Too Much for Flushing,” describes a baseball game between the fat men’s clubs of Brooklyn and Flushing: “The individual masses of rotund corpulency made up the famous Fat Men’s baseball nine of Brooklyn, and they had gone down with all the speed they were capable of to test the agility of a similar set of linear and latitudinal giants from Flushing.” The event was evidently well-attended, with a speech given by a heavyweight among the Brooklyn players, who declared he had to pay a boy 25 cents to help him put his uniform on, and another quarter to take it off.

At least some clubs had specific requirements for joining. A write-up of the first meeting of the Fat Men’s Bicycle Club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, noted that members had to weigh at least 250 pounds, and women were not allowed. Another club rule held that any member caught eating the notoriously stinky limburger cheese would have to treat the entire club as punishment.

In 1904, the Lewiston Evening Journal covered a basketball game between the Fat Men and the Professional Men in Livermore Falls, Maine. The game was so well-attended that when the teams took position to play, “the cheering was deafening.” An NPR article on fat men’s clubs notes that they expanded to areas including Nevada, Utah, and Tennessee, even crossing over to France, which had its own 100 Kilos Club: Les Cents Kilos.

The menus of the fat men’s clubs offer a look at what wealthy gastronomes were enjoying. The oyster roasts and magnificent barbeques of the Texan clubs were crowning achievements of gustatory overindulgence. In its heyday, the New England Fat Men’s Club, founded in 1903, had over 10,000 members who dined on oyster cocktail, cream of chicken soup, boiled snapper, filet of beef with mushrooms, roast chicken, roast suckling pig, shrimp salad, steamed fruit pudding with brandy sauce, cakes, cheese, and ice cream, with coffee and cigars to finish.

But by 1924, membership numbers had fallen below 38, reflecting a change in attitudes towards fatness, with medical practitioners stressing the benefits of a lean physique.

An analogous development was the decline of fat men’s races, which had been an integral part of American police department outings in the mid-19th century. Segrave writes in Obesity in America that by 1908, police force policies required that applicants weigh no more than 250 pounds. In 1910, a former police captain in New York sued after being laid off for his obesity. He was reinstated only after demonstrating to a jury that he could hop, skip, and jump as well as anybody else. By 1916, “excessive obesity” became a disqualifier for anyone applying to civil service jobs in New York.

Although fat men’s clubs had been popular, they always existed alongside a discourse privileging thinness. By the 1870s, medical journals mention people who wished to Bantingize, referring to a low-carb diet plan invented by the English dietician and undertaker William Banting. But while they were still in operation, the fat men’s clubs thumbed their nose at moderation and negative body image, in favor of a jolly good time.

Not all fun and games.

Ah, chess. The sixth-century, two-player board game that tests skill, strategy, and stamina worldwide. Each of the game’s 16 pieces (per side) has a role in the world of the chessboard. As it turns out, certain pieces may have had a use in the world beyond, too.

Recently, in a Lincolnshire village, a family renovating their old barn made a chance discovery among the wooden beams above. Two 19th-century chess pieces, a queen and a bishop, had been secreted over the mouth of the barn for several hundred years. The find represents an old spiritual practice from the Victorian era: everyday objects hidden away as protective totems.

It is thought that the queen and bishop, which are suspected to date to around 1850, were concealed at the time of the barn’s construction. This particular structure was used for keeping livestock, within a larger agricultural complex (Lincolnshire has historically been, and still is, a farming town), so a farmer may have placed the chess pieces there to watch over his animals. Adam Daubney, finds liaison officer for the Lincolnshire County Council, has encountered similar discoveries before, but none quite like this one.

“We often get reports of people finding things concealed in old buildings, objects such as miniature bibles, old shoes, bottles containing hair, and even mummified cats,” he says. “These finds—along with documentary evidence—tell us about the superstitions and beliefs of rural communities from as early as the 16th century.” Hidden objects like these tend to be located at the thresholds of buildings, so it’s understood that they operate as a spiritual patrol, minding the entrances and exits of evil spirits. “The purposeful concealment of the chess pieces makes it really clear that they were used as amulets,” Daubney adds, “as indeed does the purposeful selection of the queen and the bishop.”

According to Daubney, who has worked as a field archaeologist, the queen is likely a representation of Mary, Jesus’s mother, and the bishop, who is in a praying position, “was chosen owing to it being a potent symbol of the power of prayer.” Both feature ornate thrones and are cast in plaster of Paris, later dipped in resin. Based on the design, experts believe they were cast from a set of now-lost medieval molds.

This rare find is still owned by the family who stumbled upon it, but it’s not clear if they plan to place them over their front door.

The science-y magic of tidying up.

As semesters eventually turn to centuries, universities accumulate a lot of stuff, and they have to figure out what’s what. A science department’s storage facility might be a kind of large junk drawer, holding castoff chemicals, outdated equipment, and specimens in dusty jars—or it might be home to amazing old charts surreptitiously rolled into anonymous scrolls.

Back in 2014, a team tidying a long-languishing storage area in the chemistry department at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, came across a trove of rolled-up charts. Among those, they found a periodic table. It was printed in German, and it looked old—the creases were deep, the sides were torn, and the paper was prone to flaking.

To gauge its age, the St Andrews team dug into the history of the printer and lithographer, which were identified on the chart. They also recruited Eric Scerri, a science historian and chemist at University of California, Los Angeles. Based on the fact that the table includes gallium and scandium (discovered in 1875 and 1879), but not germanium (discovered in 1886), Scerri concluded that the chart was produced somewhere between 1875 and 1886. “There’s not much else to go on, but that’s a pretty reliable method,” Scerri says. “The elements were discovered over a period of time, and we know when they were discovered. That is a way of nailing it down.”

Scerri suspects that, in its day, a chart like this would have been “reasonably rare”—far from the classroom staple that it is now. “The periodic table didn’t have an immediate impact over chemistry and the way it was taught,” he says. “Like all scientific discoveries, it takes a while to trickle down to the people in the classrooms.”

The Siberian-born chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his first version of the chart—which organized elements according to their atomic mass—in 1869, accounting for the more than 60 elements known at the time while also predicting and leaving room for ones that weren’t yet familiar to science. A few scientists were noodling over similar ideas at the same time, and while Lothar Meyer, a German chemist, was also laying out a design for a pared-down version of a periodic table (as was the English chemist William Odling), Mendeleev swooped in with a more comprehensive chart and walked off with much of the credit. He updated the table in 1871, and when other elements were indeed discovered over the next 15 years, his work was widely embraced, write Ray and Roselyn Hiebert in the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Atomic Pioneers. Those discoveries, according to Scerri, prompted “people to sit up and take notice,” and helped to land the periodic table in chemistry classrooms.

Eventually, Mendeleev’s eight-column table was replaced by the 18-column one we know today, which also considers atomic structure, instead of just mass. In 1955, a team using the cyclotron in Berkeley, California, bombarded einsteinium with alpha particles and recorded a new element dubbed “mendelevium,” in Mendeleev’s honor.

The St Andrews team secured grants to fix up their fragile chart by removing debris and patching up tears with kozo paper and wheat paste. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev’s table, the St Andrews find is now stored in the school’s special collections, and a reproduction is hanging in the school of chemistry, for students who get a charge from bits of history almost gone for good.

They look great with sandals.

Socks and sandals. The combo might elicit cruel jabs from footwear snobs today, but people been rocking it since ancient times. In the eighth century B.C., for instance, the Greek poet Hesiod instructed contemporaries to wear piloi, something soft and matted, under their sandals. Sometime around the year 300, a kid was running around near the ancient city of Antinoupolis, in Egypt, with his or her foot stuffed into a striped sock split into two, kind of like mittens for the feet—the big toe in one part, and the four other little piggies in the other. That socked foot was likely strapped into a sandal.

Some of these ancient Egyptian socks have withstood wear, tear, and centuries, and wound up in museum collections, where scientific analysis can unravel some clues about when and how they were made. That striped wool sock from Antinoupolis was unearthed more than a century ago, from a rubbish heap near modern-day Sheikh Ibada, and is now in the British Museum. Radiocarbon dating placed its creation somewhere in the third or fourth century, during the period of Roman rule in Egypt. These were made with a technique called naalbinding (or nålebinding), which is sometimes considered a precursor to two-needle knitting and involves looping yarn on a single needle. The sock’s two toes were made separately and then joined together, and when a research team led by Joanne Dyer, a scientist at the museum, used multispectral imaging to take a closer look at the striped pattern in October 2018, they found that the alternating bands of colors were probably made by bathing the wool in natural dyes, including madder root, which tints textiles various ruddy shades.

Analysis has its uses, but it’s different than taking a stab at making something yourself. That’s what heritage educator and crafter Sally Pointer is doing, creating replicas of these and other ancient garments.

Pointer has been enamored with the ancient world since she was a kid, when she cooked up plans for potions, devices, and craft projects—all with the goal of understanding how things came to be. (“I had very tolerant parents,” she says.) In college, she studied archaeology and Middle English, and then funneled her wide-ranging fascinations into a focus on historical technology. After a few years in museum education, she went freelance. Now based in South Wales and Herefordshire, Pointer juggles a slew of commissions, from fashioning Victorian-era stockings for displays, films, and reenactors, to making one-off objects for museums and teaching lessons in heritage crafts.

While assembling hairnets in Bronze Age–style or Neolithic–era tunics, Pointer and her husband, Gareth Riseborough, have also developed a reputation for foraging in their quest to recreate little slices of the past. “I’ve got a bit of a local reputation as a hedge-botherer,’” she says. The pair once strode past country pubs carrying armfuls of lime branches, which they submerged in local waters for a few weeks until they split into thin, raffia-like strips perfect for fashioning into cords or string. (The texture was great—“quite soft and silky even,” Pointer says—once they’d vanquished a revolting, sewage-y smell.)

As ancient technology goes, textiles can be particularly intimate. Clothing often signals something the wearer wants to communicate, or reflects what a culture values. To Pointer, that makes clothing “an excellent way to start a discussion about what we think we may or may not have in common with those ancestors, even through the vast gaps in our knowledge about many of these time periods.” A certain degree of conjecture is inevitable, she adds, and later research can sometimes reveal that a prior reconstruction is all wrong. But the process itself is evocative of how ancient people spent their time, or even divided their year between, say, planting and harvesting, and, during the colder months, making indoor crafts.

Pointer found these socks appealing because they were “cheerfully striped,” and because reference images of them are easily accessible. Those allowed Pointer to scale the stripes and proportions, even if she wasn’t aiming for what she calls “a stitch-by-stitch accurate replica.”

To make these socks, she looped wool yarn around a single needle, and emulated the strategy of making one toe at a time. (This wasn’t Pointer’s first naalbinding rodeo, though, as she’s also used the technique to make ones in the style of the Viking Age.) The process of making one cup for the lone big toe, a larger one for the others, then joining them together “is the most practical way to make them,” she says. “Most early items like this show a very logical approach to construction when you look closely.”

The completed socks will hang out in the box of samples Pointer carts along to lessons, and will come in handy in a few months, when her beginning naalbinding students will have the opportunity to take a close look at her very, very old-school handiwork.

Pointer knows her knitting projects don’t function as perfect portals to the past. “No matter how accurate our reconstructions, there will always be many aspects of the original maker’s thought processes, background skills, rationale in choosing materials or technique, or just mood on a given day that we can’t hope to understand,” she says. “But making things using methods that are largely forgotten today can give us incredible insights into the relative skills, amount of time taken, and perceived ‘value’ of an item that is hard to grasp when you just look at it.” Or when you pull a sock from your drawer today.

Tell us about the world's best winter wonderlands.

It’s the middle of January and New York City has yet to see a single day of significant snow this winter—but it looks like it's finally coming in the next few days. A heavy snowfall really transforms my city into a barely recognizable new metropolis. For the fleeting time before it melts into treacherous puddles of grime, snow makes New York softer, quieter, and in my opinion, more beautiful than at any other time of the year. Are there places that you think become more lovely when covered in snow?

Maybe it’s a specific wilderness location that becomes something more cold and mysterious under a blanket of white. It could be your own city or town that becomes unforgettable and unrecognizable during the coldest months. Or maybe it’s a landmark, statue, or other spot that just looks naked without a wintry covering. We want to hear about (and see) your favorite places that are transformed by snow.

Fill out the survey below to let us know about your favorite place that gets transformed by snow. Then send a terrific, original picture of the place to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Greatest Snow.” We’ll share some of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article.

These 3,000-year-old charred seeds are the oldest of their kind ever found in Ontario.

Quinoa, it turns out, has been trendy for 3,000 years. A cache of about 140,000 charred seeds has been discovered in Brantford, Ontario—further north than examples of the species from this period have ever been found.

The discovery was made back in 2010, when archaeologists were assessing a construction site that has since become a housing development. The work was routine, part of a legislative mandate in Ontario to dig into lands being developed both publicly and privately. So while the land is obviously archaeologically bountiful, no one expected any of the finds to be so, well, groundbreaking—often, in such a loaded area, they’re just part of the furniture. “It’s the first time I’ve been close to being shocked in 45 years of research,” said Gary Crawford, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto, to Yahoo! News. Crawford is the lead author on a study of the seeds, published last month in American Antiquity.

The seeds were found in an excavated pit alongside stone tools dating to the Meadowood, or Early Woodland, period, between 2,400 and 3,000 years ago. That was enough to make the researchers think that the seeds could be just as old, a hunch confirmed by radiocarbon dating that traced the seeds back to 900 BC. “The next time we find a crop in the province is about 500 AD, and it’s corn,” said Crawford in a University of Toronto release. “All previous research on this species of quinoa, which is now extinct, has taken place in the central United States: Arkansas, Illinois, and Kentucky.” Kentucky, he added, is the farthest north that any of the seeds from this period had previously been found.

This likely sheds new light on the trading practices of the Indigenous people living in what is present-day Ontario during the Early Woodland period. While the researchers can’t be absolutely sure, “I think the safe interpretation is this stuff was being imported,” Crawford told Yahoo. There’s no evidence of the plant being grown locally, not to mention of any other crops in the province until nearly 1,500 years later. Moreover, “it would make sense that it wasn’t only stone and minerals being moved around,” said Crawford in the release. Ontario’s Grand River was “like an I-65” for trade, and likely how other crops like maize later made their way into the region, says Ron Williamson of Archaeological Services Inc., who co-authored the study.

Though the team must “equivocate” out of caution, he adds, on where exactly the quinoa was grown, its presence in Brantford still marks the oldest discovery of this domesticated plant in all of Ontario’s 18,000 Indigenous sites. No matter where it was grown, the grain has been in high demand for quite some time.

After a brief stint in captivity, she will be released, but even then, her future is uncertain.

On January 14, 2019, the last mountain caribou to call the contiguous United States home made her exit from the wild, according to Science.

A team of biologists from British Columbia captured the female caribou in the Selkirk Mountains, just north of the United States-Canada border. They moved her to a captivity pen near the city of Revelstoke, where she will stay for at least a month, Science reports. It is believed that she is the only surviving member of the southernmost caribou herd, the final herd to spend its time on both sides of the border.

Canada’s caribou populations have been dwindling over the years as their habitats become increasingly threatened by those seeking the natural resources, including timber, gas, and oil, present there. Climate change has also been a major factor as it cripples food sources and creates irregular weather patterns, making it difficult for caribou to survive.

Without an abundance of caribou, other animal populations across Canada stand to suffer. Caribou are regarded as an umbrella species, meaning their survival directly impacts the entire ecosystem where they reside. Their droppings help restore various plants that are crucial to the diets of other animals living in their habitat. Predators such as grizzly bears and wolves rely on caribou as a key food source. They have also been key to the survival of Indigenous populations across Canada for centuries, providing clothing, tools, and weapons.

The ultimate plan for this particular female caribou is to release her, along with two others from endangered herds, back into the wild. At that point, the CBC reports, they’ll join a different herd, one in Canada with 146 animals. However, because mountain caribou are unique, an ecotype found nowhere else, no one is sure if these individual animals will survive.

At least until the British Empire turned its attention to India.

Carved of fruitwood, lined with lead, and shaped like a peach, the fist-sized box is endearingly painted just like a fruit: yellow with streaks of red on top, and a few brown dimples that resemble bruises. A painted leaf curls against one side, and its lid is topped with a stem that can be used to open it. Something distinctly less-fruit-like is the metal lock mounted front and center.

The box is one of the more than 450 containers known as tea caddies in Mark Bramble’s personal collection, 25 of which feature locks. Bramble took over this collection from his mother in the 1980s. A Broadway writer and director, he makes detours to antique dealers when traveling for productions around the world to add to his collection. While his mother preferred porcelain caddies, Bramble is drawn to wood and papier mache versions, some of which feature locks designed to safeguard precious tea from sticky fingers. Vessels like these once appeared in upper-class English homes, and their use provides insight into the global dealings of the British Empire.

When Camellia sinensis leaves were first introduced to England from China in the 17th century, they were prohibitively expensive. In the 1690s, the Countess of Argyll paid over £10 for just six ounces of tea, at a time when her estate lawyer’s annual income was a mere £20. Some wealthy families paid a portion of their servants’ wages in tea, or provided them with a modest tea allowance (a practice criticized by some, who thought the lower classes should content themselves with beer and ale).

For many in the monied classes, being waited on hand and foot also meant living with the fear of thievery—be it of the family silver or the coveted tea leaves. There was even concern that leftover tea leaves would be dried and sold as new. “You have also heard, that your maids sometimes dry your leaves and sell them,” read a letter in the May 1794 issue of Anthologia Hibernica. “Your industrious nymph, bent on gain, may get a shilling a pound for such tea.” Hence the practice of keeping the family’s tea safe in caddies fitted with locks and keys, or in secured in wooden chests where caddies were stored in pairs (one for green tea and one for black).

Although the caddies were representative of class divisions in English society, some, such as the peach, were not without their charm.

“I also have a wooden box that’s in the form of a cottage from the Regency period—the early 19th century,” Bramble says. “And it’s charming. It’s naively painted, you can feel the warmth of the creator.”

The high cost of tea was enabled by the notorious British East India Company, which monopolized trade with China, leading to a thriving black market for tea (that included counterfeits, such as sloe leaves dyed with sheep dung). By the 1780s, the smuggled tea trade had surpassed legal distribution.

“Andrews the smuggler brought me this night, about 11 o’clock, a bag of Hyson tea … he frightened us a little, by whistling under the parlour window, just as we were going to bed,” clergyman James Woodforde write in his diary in 1777.

Most tea was of pretty poor quality—weak, overboiled, and mixed with who-knows-what. Pure, high-quality tea remained a luxury, and elaborate rituals and an armada of specialized instruments were developed for storing, brewing, and serving it, from detailed tea caddies to silver sugar tongs to elaborate hot water urns.

The status of tea, and the need for locking tea caddies, began to shift in 1833, when the East India Company lost its trade monopoly in China. As the Company resorted to drug smuggling and military tactics (i.e., the Opium Wars) to safeguard profits, trade didn’t improve. Instead, it became increasingly expensive and politically untenable. So the British looked to their other imperial holdings.

“What really drove the British to look towards India was a desire to expand their trading empire, and to turn a profit in an area [India] that was a money-losing operation at the time,” says economic historian Andrew Liu, author of a forthcoming book comparing tea trade and production in 19th-century China and India.

British officials granted settlers swathes of land in Assam, in northeast India, in the hope that they would cultivate it. Migrants and indentured servants were brought in to work the land. Charles Bruce, who had fought with the East India Company against the Burmese to acquire Assam, was made superintendent of the burgeoning tea plantations. The industry soon thrived in Assam’s wet climate and rich soil, and even today it is the top tea-producing region in the world.

By the end of the 19th century, tea cultivation was firmly rooted in India and Sri Lanka, both British colonies. By 1901, over six pounds of tea were imported to England for each person—over three times the consumption of fifty years before. Tea became the hallmark of British culture we know today, available to everyone—and locking tea caddies entered the world of collectibles.