One of the golfers on the winning 1904 team. (Photo: Public domain)
Golf has only been an Olympic sport twice in history, most recently in 1904, in St. Louis, Missouri. And H. Chandler Egan, the World’s Amateur Champion of Golf, won both gold and silver—gold in the team competition, and silver in the individual. More than 100 years later, his grandchildren found his medals stashed away in their mother’s house.
“ It was in the back of a shelf with a door on it and it was behind a whole bunch of books and all these things, a box of medals and the letters and the scrapbooks. It was all hidden,” his grandson told USA Today.
Golf, in the early 20th century, was played only in a few places; the Olympics competitors were all American or Canadian. It didn’t stick as an Olympic sport, although this year, it’s coming back again. Olympic golf medals, though, are incredibly rare: the silver that Egan’s grandchildren found is the only one still known to exist.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Our soft, processed foods have played a significant role in the development of our jaw bones (Photo: Joshua Rappeneker/CC BY-SA 2.0)
For a couple years as a Harvard graduate student, Katherine Zink spent a lot of time watching people chew. She would patiently wait while people chomped on crisp vegetables and gummy raw goat meat. Right before they would normally swallow, each person would spit out the food into test tubes for Zink to meticulously splay out for scanning and measuring.
Picking through regurgitated food particles would be difficult for anyone with a sensitive stomach, but queasiness was magnified for Zink who had been six months pregnant at the time.
“Nothing says, 'Let’s get this experiment over with,’ than I’m about to give birth to twins,” recalls Zink, who is now a professor and functional morphologist at Harvard. But her days of nausea paid off: The study, published in the journal Nature this past March, illuminated key information about how chewing foods that have been just simply pounded and sliced with rudimentary tools could have led to the evolution of our current jaws.
It turns out that chewing has had a huge impact on the way we look. In order to understand the structure of the skull, scientists must study how food is chewed and processed as well as the types of food eaten over evolutionary time. And compared to our ancestors, we are pretty lame chewers.
“If you look at the earliest Homo sapiens, we are kind of weaklings from a chewing standpoint,” says Zink.
While this illustration of the human skull shows flat jaw bones, our ancestors had zygomatic arches that were tall and flared because the chewing muscle underneath was so large. (Photo: Public Domain)
Zink’s study sought to find out just how much cooked and processed foods affect how we chew, and thus the morphology of our jaws. She had subjects chew on carrots, red beetroots, yams, and goat meat prepared three different ways: raw, pounded, sliced, and cooked. Electrodes were attached to the face and jaw muscles so she could collect data on how much force was generated with each chew. After the subjects spit the food out, she placed everything on trays on top of a scanner, dispersed all the particles of food in each sample so they weren’t touching, took pictures, and measured each particle digitally.
She found that with just slicing and pounding meat, early humans would have needed to chew 17 percent less often and 26 percent less forcefully—saving as many as 2.5 million chews per year.
“Including meat in the diet and just using mechanical processing results in a large difference in regards to chewing effort,” says Zink. “To me the surprise was more the magnitude of the benefit rather than the fact that there was a benefit.”
Even after more than 40 chews of the raw goat meat, particles were still predominately in one large clump.
"When you give people raw goat, they chew and chew and chew, and most of the goat is still one big clump—it’s like chewing gum," Daniel Lieberman, head of Harvard's Skeletal Biology Lab and supervisor of Zink’s study, told the Harvard Gazette. "But once you start processing it mechanically, even just slicing it, the effects on chewing performance are dramatic."
The study's results supply more evidence to the idea that less chewing with the advent of food processing and cooking has resulted in major changes in skull and bone development. The bones involved in chewing reveal a lot about our evolutionary history, anthropologists often analyzing the feeding apparatus of fossilized remains.
Around four million years ago, a group of our ancestors, the small bodied pre-human australopithecines, had thick, strong muscles attached to massive jaw bones, explains David Strait, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. The large muscles allowed australopithecines to bite with incredible force, which in turn was resisted by bony pillars and buttresses in their facial skeletons. Their cheek teeth—molars and premolars—were also large, round, and covered with an especially thick, hard outer coating of protective enamel.
Natural selection probably favored these adaptations to allow australopithecines to process tough or hard foods, says Strait, but just over two million years ago, that trend reversed itself. The earliest members of the genus Homo, the group to which we belong to, evolved to have an much smaller chewing apparatus, leading to humans' very weak chewing muscles, flat delicate faces, and small teeth.
This is “very correlated, in some general sense, with the evolution of food processing, like tool use to slice up food,” says Strait.
The energy needed to chew unprocessed food is used for other developmental growth and function. Zink and Lieberman suggest that our flatter faces and teeth have contributed to speech production, locomotion, thermoregulation, and maybe even larger brain sizes. But, some scientists hypothesize that because our jaws are not being worked enough, the smaller overall size has caused dental issues, such as dental crowning, impacted molars, and malocclusions, which is when the upper and lower teeth do not sit together properly.
“There wasn’t oral surgery millions of years ago, but now it’s incredibly common to have to take teeth out,” says Strait.
Zink wonders how modern-day, sophisticated food processing techniques will influence the evolution of our jaw morphology. From observation and crude data, she says we spend very little time eating, let alone chewing. Today, it's even possible to consume juiced and pulverized meals that require little to no chewing at all. Next, Zink wants to find out if there are links between the types of foods that hominins may have eaten and chewing performance. She is also working with an orthodontist in France to see if chewing exercises affect jaw growth in children. However, in her next experiments, Zink will happily pass on the regurgitated food sifting duties to someone else.
“We got amazing data, but it’s probably something I would never do again.”
Dewey Cyr figured it would be years before she made it back to Barcelona. She loves the city—she spent a blissful semester there in college—but even a cheap flight from Boston costs a good $800 round-trip. For Cyr and her husband, both graduate students, such a voyage hardly seemed realistic.
But then, on February 29th, Cyr checked Facebook and saw, tucked among various updates and news articles and photos, an all-caps post shared by a friend. "ERROR FARE: NEW YORK TO MANY EUROPEAN CITIES FROM ONLY $252 RETURN," it blared. After a few rounds of frantic clicking, Cyr, like hundreds of others that day, ended up with two tickets to Barcelona, at $282 each. She had potted the savvy traveler's favorite new prey—an error fare.
Cyr vividly remembers the thrill of booking her Barcelona ticket. (As someone who tried and failed to nab the same deal, the moment is lodged in my memory, too). But when I mention it to Tarik Allag—the founder of Secret Flying, the site that surfaced the fare—it takes him a minute to recall that particular coup."Oh, that was a big one!" he says as it snaps into place. "That was really good."
A photo posted by Secret Flying (@secretflying) on
It's hard to blame him. Every day, Secret Flying tempts its hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers with dozens of cheap flights. Some are regular deals—discounts, flash sales, and other airline-approved promotions. Others, though, are error fares. These accidental glitches plunge prices down so low, they make you do a double-take: Portugal to Brazil for just 114 euros for a 10-hour, nearly 5,000-mile trip, for example, or Switzerland to Thailand for an insane €6.
For years, computer-savvy travelers have sniffed out these lucrative mistakes, sifting through airfare matrices for hours until they strike gold, and communicating with each other in code to keep airlines from following their trail. More recently, though, aggregators like Secret Flying have made it easier than ever to nab error fares. In the process, they've turned flight deal-seeking into a sport—and a dedicated community.
Allag got into the error fare game for a simple reason—he lives in London, and he hates rain. "The weather out here is terrible," he says. "Any excuse to leave is good enough." After about 18 months of seeking out deals for himself and his friends, he figured he'd level up: "I thought, why not just take a punt at it and provide cheap flights to the public?" he says. "I really didn't expect it to be so successful so quickly." Allag, who formerly worked in sports medicine, now runs the site full-time, aided by a team of employees stationed around the world.
Back in the early days of air travel, many governments, including the U.S., regulated ticket prices. Customers would walk up to a flight desk or a travel agent, pay a predictable amount, and be on their way. Beginning in the late 1970s, though, pricing in the U.S. was deregulated, computers replaced telephone hubs, and everything started to get complicated. As with any system, the more moving pieces that get added—sub-charges that make up the total fares, intermediaries between the airline and the automatic and human systems tasked with managing all of it—the higher the probability that something will go wrong, and that the numbers that go in one end will come out differently on the other side.
Allag sorts error fares into three types. Some are plain old computer glitches, hiccups by airline websites, or by online travel agencies like Expedia or Kayak. Others are mistakes made by real live employees: "One of the biggest error fares we had was with United Airlines—first-class tickets from the U.K. to pretty much anywhere in the U.S. for $79, when it should have been over $4,000," says Allag. "That was a human-error fare. They inputted the wrong currency conversion from Danish kroner to British pounds."
The third and most common species of error fare is known as a "fuel dump." Although it shows up as a flat rate on your receipt, the price of an airline ticket is actually made up of three components: the base fare, taxes, and a so-called "fuel surcharge," which varies widely from flight to flight (and, often, from day to day). "Because the fuel surcharge was implemented long after the reservation systems were created, they are prone to glitches," says Allag.
With the right combination of flights, it's possible to confuse the system sufficiently that part or all of the fuel surcharge simply falls off. If the base fare was low to begin with, you're left with a great deal.
Fuel surcharges, as explained by Scott Mackenzie. (Image: TravelCodex)
Searching for fuel dumps manually is difficult and time-consuming, not to mention against airline policy. For years, it was largely the purview of a small community of devotees. These patient travelers tested combinations, kept track of slowly-emerging patterns, and shared their findings on forums other travel bloggers called "the Wild West of the airline ticket world."
Here, threads were headed up with blocky red warnings ("Do not call the airlines under any conditions!"). Fares were explained via code words, to thwart lurking employees—referencing "The 13-Miler" meant that adding a particular Caribbean leg would slough off a fuel surcharge, while "Pineapple Poke" indicated the same for a jump between Hawaiian islands. Secret fares were kept, in a word, secret. In 2010, a deal site called Airfarewatchdog shared a fuel dump, and was immediately confronted by what the site's owner described as "a virtual mob with torches and pitchforks."
Now, though, the former Wild West is opening up."Many more sites—including mine—are writing about [fuel dumps] and exposing them to a new audience, even if they aren’t actually adding any new information to the conversation," says Scott Mackenzie, who heads up the blog TravelCodex and has been hunting fuel dumps since 2010. When a lot of people jump on a deal, airlines quickly find out about it. If this happens enough times, they, too, can find patterns, and fix glitches that might have otherwise led to future mistakes. As a result, Mackenzie says, "fuel dumps are much less common than they used to be."
The deals that remain, though, reach far more people. Allag—who generally sticks to less dicey strategies, though he has created a fuel dump tool "for educational purposes only"—considers this a net gain that transcends the monetary. "On first glance, people think we're just saving people money, but it's not really that," he says. "It's more about helping people shape their travels."
Where ordinary travel requires meticulous saving and detailed planning, traveling by error fare rewards spontaneity, and a willingness to head to less obvious destinations. A certain overall flexibility is also required—airlines can, and do, cancel tickets purchased through error fares. As Allag puts it, "It's not for everyone."This week alone, error fares popped up that—if they're honored—could send Europeans to Chile, Floridians to Pakistan, and New Yorkers to Zurich. "It's just a lovely feeling," he says.
Those on the other side generally agree, as is evidenced by the comments they leave on posted deals (the site also gets a lot of fan mail, Allag says.) Some people are so enamored with this system, they're essentially letting error fares plan their vacations—Cyr, for example, is headed to Norway next January, thanks to another well-timed post.
Even those who can't leave on a dime can, in some ways, benefit from this philosophy. After my failure to book a ticket to Europe, I pinned Secret Flying to the top of my Facebook newsfeed. When I sign on to see what's happening in my small world, their posts—which tend to combine sunny photos with enthusiastic diction ("GO! GO! GO!")— remind me of what's out there, and that it might be easier to get to than I thought.
“I have some things to say about sex, which, so far as I am aware, have not yet been said, or if said will bear repeating and reemphasizing.”
So wrote Marie Stopes in Married Love, a groundbreaking advice book published in 1918 that aimed to end the “sex-ignorance” of the adult populace. Released in the U.K., the book was immediately condemned by the Church and banned from the U.S. But thanks to discreet mail orders, Married Love made its way into the desperate hands of men and women alike, tackling the epidemic of sex-ignorance, prompting a tidal wave of correspondence, and establishing Stopes as the closest thing to an expert on sexual equality that the early 20th century ever had—despite, as all evidence suggests, her being a virgin herself.
“That girls can reach a marriageable age without some knowledge of the realities of sex would seem incredible: but it is a fact,” wrote Stopes. A functional marriage, she said, was not instinctual, and even the “supreme human art” required practice. At the very least, she wrote, every mating man and woman should know the essential facts. She added a wild, bonus proposition: women needed to enjoy their time in bed, too.
One of many encouraging quotes in Married Love. (Image: Married Love/Courtesy of New York Academy of Medicine)
Married Love began when Stopes discovered that her first husband was impotent. (“It was the moment when Canadian impotence makes its mark on the world,” as 20th-century British historian Stephen Brooke would say.) Upon discovering their sexual incompatibility, Stopes went to court to file for a divorce; however, as a woman in 1916 England, the only way she could get a divorce was by proving non-consummation of their marriage. The only way to do that was to present a certificate from a doctor testifying that her hymen was intact, explains Janine Utell, Professor and Chair of English at Widener University, who is currently doing work on one of Stopes’ earlier and less known texts, Love Letters of a Japanese.
This adverse experience spurred Stopes to educate others on sexuality. She had paid “such a terrible price for sex-ignorance,” she wrote, “that I feel that knowledge gained at such a price should be placed at the service of humanity.” By the end of 1913—with the help of medical libraries and her experience talking with “thousands of men and hundreds of women”—Stopes had put together a collection of biological basics, social stances, and erotic advice. Five years later, after being turned down by every publisher in town, birth control activist and Stopes’ soon-to-be second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, provided the financing to launch the book.
Married Love’s first 2,000 copies were snatched up within a fortnight, and by 1921, it had gone through 100,000 copies, six editions, and multiple translations. By 1938, it had sold 820,000 copies worldwide. In England, even those who had not encountered the book had most likely heard of it (you might have even noticed it mentioned between characters in the British TV series Downton Abbey), and there are even examples of the book being found in army barracks during World War II. Stopes was a pioneer, mainstreamer, and popularizer of information on sex, following years of obtuse, science-focused conversation among elite (male) sexologists. Stopes wrote “simply, and for the ordinary untrained reader,” she saidin Married Love, and focused on sexual normalcy rather than sexual abnormalities. “It’s as frank as you’re going to find,” says Stephen Heathorn PhD, a historian of modern Britain at McMaster University, of the book at the time.
In an era when sex was still considered a husband’s right and a wife’s duty, Stopes’ arguments were revolutionary. “The number of people who buy the book suggests it’s this very quiet revolution—the mainstreaming of something that has been considered unspeakable: talking about sex, and sexual organs,” says Brooke, the author of Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day. “She’s a critical figure—not just in terms of contraception; also the idea of sexual pleasure, and the insistence that sexual pleasure is essential to marital companionship,” he says. Equally shocking, says Heathorn, was the idea that women should take control of some aspect of the sexual relationship.
A chart in Married Love illustrating the "Periodicity of Recurrence of natural desire in healthy women." Stopes kept detailed records on the swings and shifts in her own body as early as 1914. (Photo: Married Love)
Author and professor Janine Utell says Married Love hit at just the right moment. By the 1890s, women were opting for greater freedom of attire and birth rates were going down. During World War I, thousands entered the workforce and also served as nurses, an experience that forced many of them them to deal with men’s bodies in a frank and open way. By the end of WWI, people were starting to talk more about family planning; in 1918, women in Britain over the age of 30 gained the right to vote; and in general, questions of equality and sex had begun to brew. Over in America, Margaret Sanger, who advised Stopes on her writing, was publishing booklets like Family Limitation (1914) and The Case for Birth Control (1917), and in 1916, founded Planned Parenthood in New York City.
Yet, even after these seismic shifts, society was still, perhaps, not quite ready for all that Stopes had to say. Heathorn points out that the assumption has long been that women were the most interested in birth control during this period. Yet many of them preferred to preserve what Stopes describes in Married Love as a “flower-like innocence,” that she considered willful ignorance. Interestingly, says Heathorn, nearly half the letters Stopes received were written by men rather than women. Though Stopes was trying to empower women to take ownership of their own bodies, most women still handed that responsibility over to their husbands—birth control included.
Before becoming Britain’s resident sexpert, Stopes was the youngest person in Britain to receive a Doctor of Science degree from University College London and the first woman to earn a PhD in botany from the Botanical Institute in Munich. She voiced support for women’s suffrage and kept her surname through two marriages. In 1920, she published a “practical sequel” to Married Love titled Wise Parenthood, closely detailing different birth control techniques, and soon after, “A Letter to Working Mothers,” a condensed version aimed specifically at the working class. In 1921, she founded England’s first birth control clinic and the Society for Constructive Birth Control, and would later expand her efforts internationally. Over the course of her widespread career, she spearheaded the Birth Control News, wrote a travel book on Japan, published plentiful poetry, and even managed to have a kid in the midst of it all.
Her intentions and moral compass can, of course, be criticized from our current perch, 100 years later; she did not support abortion, and sex in her opinion belonged strictly within a heterosexual marriage. Moreover, Stopes was a staunch supporter of eugenics, even bequeathing a good chunk of her fortune to the Eugenics Society. A Roman Catholic doctor named Halliday Sutherland even accused Stopes of using poor women for birth control experiments, to which Stopes responded by suing him for libel; the resulting trials brought Stopes a great amount of publicity and boosted both her book sales and her prominence as a public speaker.
A "Prorace" cervical cap, one type of birth control that was dispensed at Stopes' London clinic between 1920-1950. (Photo: Wellcome Images/CC BY 4.0)
As Brooke notes, there were very few people at the time who were interested in sexuality and not to some degree influenced by eugenics. (For example, at the time, cervical caps were often referred to as “racial caps,” in reference to bettering the human race by controlling reproduction.) But eugenics was not Stopes’ crowning cause. “She was trying to carve out a space for female sexuality that is not marginalized, castigated, demonized,” says Brooke. “I don't think that’s to do with eugenics, but her experience as a woman… someone who changes the expectations of marriage, in a way.”
In Married Love,Stopes points out that men have mainly run the world, and that consequently, the “woman’s side of sexual life has found little or no expression.” Woman, she wrote, “has been content to mold herself to the shape desired by man wherever possible… woman has bowed to man’s desire over her body, and, regardless of its pulses, he approaches her or not as is his will.” She made it abundantly clear that rape can exist within marriage.
An illustration of cervical caps in Wise Parenthood. (Image: Wise Parenthood/Courtesy of New York Academy of Medicine)
To Stopes, women’s fear of pregnancy meant that sex and birth control were inextricably intertwined. How could a woman ever enjoy sex if in constant fear of becoming pregnant? Miscarriages and failed pregnancies, malnourished infants and unwanted children were a source of pain and imprisonment, especially for working women—not to mention a giant impediment to anything resembling “married love.” Interestingly, this newfound concept of female sexual fulfillment could have signaled a new phenomenon for men: “You could say, of course, and I think it has been argued, that this is the beginning of a lot of male anxiety about sexual performance,” says Brooke. “And again, this comes from the book—for Stopes, the litmus test for a satisfying sex life is female orgasm, but not just that: mutual orgasm.”
But to Stopes, “married love” went beyond the mere physical. It also meant intellectual equality: “Every year one sees a widening of the independence and the range of the pursuits of women; but still, far too often, marriage puts an end to woman's intellectual life. Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners.”
Suffragettes out in the streets in 1913. Not all suffragettes were in support of Stopes' work. (Photo: Rose Sanderson/Public Domain)
The politics of sex and family planning in early 20th-century Britain—as in modern-day America, Zika-infected Brazil, and everywhere else—was inseparable from issues of class. While mechanical forms of contraception, such as cervical caps, spermicides, and reusable rubber condoms, were available in Britain by the 1880s and 90s, they continued to be expensive and hard to access throughout the following century (and even today). Aside from disposable income, the upper classes also had access to medical information generally lacked by the working class. “Knowledge is needed, and as things are at present,” wrote Stopes in Married Love, “knowledge is almost unobtainable by those who are most in want of it.”
Almost 100 years after the publication of Married Love, the name Marie Stopes is rarely recognized, but we are still navigating the seas of a movement she spurred into motion. Even if one doesn’t agree with Stopes’ stance on “sexual anesthesia,” “wave-lengths of the soul,” and diseases borne of abstinence, or agree that there are “tragically few marriages which approach even humanly attainable joy,” it is impossible to ignore all the things that Stopes got right, back when no one was getting them at all. She refuted the idea that marriage requires the sacrifice of one member (the woman), and addressed the ever-relevant issues of intimate partner violence, intellectual equality, and the right to female pleasure.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un recently toured a new kimchi factory in Pyongyang. According to reports, he liked it so much, he wants to put them everywhere.
The Ryugyong Factory was, in the words of state media, "built under the loving care" of Kim, reports Agence France-Presse. It turns out 4,200 tons of kimchi every year.
Last year, UNESCO granted "Intangible Cultural Heritage" status to North Korean kimchi-making. The special blend of pickled veggies "is often homemade, and comes in many varieties," the BBC reported at the time. "There are intense rivalries between regions and families over who has the best version," and Koreans tend to get together in late fall to make enough to last through the winter.
The Ryugyong Factory has "modernized, mechanized, and automated all the production processes on a high level, including processing, fermentation, and ripening," reported press agency Explore DPRK. A video, posted above, shows Kim walking around a clean, empty factory.
After his inspection tour, Kim called for the construction of similar, modern kimchi factories in every province, all based on Ryugyong. He also urged the factory to "make it more delicious than that produced by individual households, and thus make it a favorite dish of the citizens and the best food in the world."
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On rare occasions, people have gotten high using not pills, but gills—by eating the fish Sarpa salpa.
Recognizable by gold stripes running along its side, the fish, known by its common name salema porgy, is an otherwise unremarkable inhabitant of temperate and tropical areas, from the Atlantic coast of Africa and up throughout the Mediterranean Sea. But don’t let its seemingly harmless exterior fool you—salema porgy can function as a hallucinogen, and a rather terrifying one at that.
Because of its properties—it's known in Arabic as "the fish that makes dreams"—this sea bream was supposedly consumed as a recreational drug in the Roman Empire and used among Polynesians for ceremonial purposes. Today reports of actual trips from eating the fish are few and far between, but two recent case studies published in 2006 in an article in the journal Clinical Toxicology paint a picture of just how psychedelic this ocean dweller truly is.
According to the article, in 1994, a 40-year-old man felt nauseated about two hours after enjoying fresh baked Sarpa salpa on his vacation on the French Riviera. With symptoms like blurred vision, muscle weakness and vomiting persisting and worsening throughout the next day, he cut his vacation short and hopped in the car, only to realize mid-journey that he couldn’t drive with all the screaming animals distracting him. These giant arthropods—mere hallucinations, of course—were the last straw. The man directed himself to a hospital, where he recovered completely after 36 hours. He couldn’t recall a thing.
That wasn’t the only case. The next reported incident came in 2002, when after purchasing, cleaning and eating the fish in Saint Tropez, also on the French Riviera, a 90-year-old man started to experience hallucinations of screaming humans and squawking birds. For two nights he had horrifying nightmares, but he didn’t let anyone know, thinking he was developing a mental illness. Fortunately for him, the effects of the fish subsided after a couple days.
These often demonic hallucinations, both auditory and visual, characterize the phenomenon known as ichthyoallyeinotoxism, a rare poisoning following the ingestion of certain fish. Catherine Jadot, a marine biologist at the Reef Ball Foundation whose doctoral research focused on the fish, says such poisoning can trigger nervous system disturbances and cause effects similar to those of LSD.
Why do some people eat sea bream with no apparent side effects while others are transported to a world of utter chaos of nightmarish proportions? If everyone could take the trip of a lifetime, why wouldn’t there be more stories of Mediterranean meals gone wrong, of a black market of sea bream?
Figuring out what exactly makes this fish so trippy isn't so easy. A study published in In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology in 2012, however, linked the fish’s consumption of phytoplankton that grow on the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, one of the main components of its diet, with higher levels of toxicity in the fish’s organs. This elevated toxicity could be a reason why certain Sarpa salpa take a toll on humans’ physical and mental wellbeing.
Posidonia oceanica, the seagrass home of phytoplankton eaten by Sarpa salpa. (Photo: Yoruno/CC BY-SA 3.0)
It’s not clear, though, which toxins are responsible for such a vivid response in the eater. They could be alkaloids of the indole group, compounds occurring naturally in certain algae and phytoplankton the fish eat and which are chemically similar in structure to LSD. Or a hallucinogen called dimethlytrypthamine (DMT), the same compound found in the spiritual healing brew ayahuasca, might be responsible.
Crystals of DMT, the compound that might be responsible for the hallucinogenic effects. (Photo: Public Domain)
Jadot says there's not enough research yet about the agents that might cause ichthyoallyeinotoxism or the specific effects the fish has on those who consume it.
For one, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when this fish can and can’t poison you. Apparently, certain body parts, including the fish's head, contain these trippy toxins, whereas others are hallucinogen-free. And the season during which the fish is caught plays a role, too; the same 2012 study cited autumn as the time of year when toxicity was highest in the fish. But the most reports of poisoning, the 2006 report says, are from late spring and summer.
The odds are that you won't find yourself accidentally tripping on Sarpa salpa. But in the unlikely event you order sea bream on the French Riviera and experience 36 hours of soul-wrenching terror, at least you'll know the cause.
— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) June 8, 2016
Aboriginal ochre stencils, believed to be up to 8,000 years old, were recently scratched out in Tasmania, in what the country's Aboriginal Affairs Minister is calling a "shameful act," according to the Guardian.
Aboriginal peoples created the stencils by grinding up ochre, mixing it with kangaroo blood, and blowing it on to their hands, making an outline of their hand on the rock. It was a sacred process, Clyde Mansell, an aboriginal leader told the Guardian.
“It’s not just a hand stencil, it’s the story that goes with the hand stencils that turns it into a sacred site," Mansell said. "If we can’t protect that hand stencil, then we can’t keep it in our interpretation for generations to come.”
The destroyed stencil was one of 10 known stencils still left, though several are almost too faded to locate. The destroyed one, seen above, was one of the clearest.
Authorities have no suspects, though the destroyed stencil was found on May 25, or the day before National Sorry Day, a yearly Australian memorial for the Stolen Generations.
“It’s difficult to imagine what could motivate someone to undertake such a senseless act," Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman said, "but that will hopefully come to light following a police investigation."
When you're a canine, sometimes you get yourself into predicaments. Some predicaments that you get into are not a huge deal, like getting gunk on your paws or being saddled with the dreaded electronic training collar. And then there are other predicaments, the ones where you need your two-legged friends to help you out.
The video above shows a dog who has found himself somehow stuck in what appears to be a storm drain. The sides of the drain are too steep to climb, so a few helpful humans work together to get him out. Man's best friend, indeed.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Australia’s cliffside Waverly Cemetery is one of the most iconic graveyards in the world with burial sites edging up against a severe cliff, but after recent storms, the famous Aussies buried there are in danger of falling into the sea.
Located in Sydney, above Bronte Beach, the graveyard is home to some 50,000 graves, packed right up to the cliff’s edge. First established in 1877, the cemetery is the final final resting place of a number of Australian notables including the poet Henry Lawson, and Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton. In addition to its evocative cliffside location the cemetery is well known for the large number of surviving Victorian and Edwardian stonework and monuments.
But heavy storms have placed parts of the historic graveyard in a precarious position. As reported in the Daily Mail, after recent, heavy storm activity in Sydney, the cliffs at the edge of the cemetery have begun to fall away, jeopardizing the bodies buried underneath.
The landslip has been temporarily halted with some emergency webbing, but the problem remains. The cemetery might have a great seaside view, but nature can be fickle.
The inspector for the Idaho State Department of Agriculture was confused.
A manager at the Caldwell, Idaho, plant he was inspecting in March 2015 had just stated that a farmer named Bernard Saul had delivered around 300,000 pounds of alfalfa seeds in an eight-month period to be coated—a process by which the some inert compounds are added to the seeds, to increase reliability when it comes to planting.
But to Jason Laney, the inspector, 300,000 pounds seemed impossible. Saul's farm in Bliss, Idaho, was just 48 acres, and should only be producing 15 percent of that total, according to the Capital Press. Laney would know, since he had inspected Saul's farm himself the prior year.
What was going on here? Fraud, among other things, and a criminal scheme that Saul, 58, had been running for years. Fake organic foods can be massively lucrative, since foods labeled as organic can command such high prices. In Saul's case, that meant he could sell his seeds at $1.25 a pound more than what he might get if they were conventional seeds. That may sound small, but it added up: to over $1.9 million in profits over the course of around five years, prosecutors have said.
With that money, Saul lived the good life, buying, among other things, 438 acres of land, a $36,505 Dodge truck; a boat and trailer worth $42,553, and $20,000 in payments on an RV, according to the Idaho Statesman.
But that was before investigators caught up to him, and before Laney noticed the discrepancy. The probe into Saul was made public in February, and, a month later, he was in court, pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud and money laundering. On Tuesday, he received his sentence—three years in prison, and restitution of $1.9 million. The truck, boat, trailer, and land were all forfeited to the government, and Saul would be going to prison. (A lawyer for Saul did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told the Idaho Statesman in March that, Saul "accepts responsibility for his actions and will do what he can to make things right with his customers.")
Saul's case is extreme, but organic product fraud can be a real problem. Last year, for example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture settled over a dozen cases of alleged organic labeling fraud with producers, collecting $1.8 million in civil penalties to go along with it. And those numbers do not include state departments of agriculture, like Idaho's, who do their own inspections. But all of this oversight is trained only on American farms, while a huge portion of organic food originates overseas, where organic standards may not be the same. The USDA is also supposed to keep an eye out on those products as well, handing out certificates to producers who meet organic standards, but, as the journalist Peter Laufer has pointed out, it isn't exactly hard to forge those certificates.
Saul's fraud turned out to be both simple and sophisticated, seemingly easy to get away with up until the point that it wasn't. That's because Saul was growing organic alfalfa seeds on his farm. But that was a cover for a bigger operation: buying non-organic alfalfa seeds in bulk and then turning around and reselling them as organic, according to the Capital Press. Buyers, for their part, had no reason to believe they were fake, since the seeds ostensibly came from Saul's farm, which had been inspected and approved.
Laney's visit to the seed coating processor, though, would put an end to all of it, and over the course of several months, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture slowly built their case against Saul. Three times between April 2015 and August 2015, they collected sample seeds from the seed coating plant that were Saul's, and then had them tested, according to the Capital Press. All three samples came back positive for pesticides and fungicides.
Meanwhile, the FBI got involved, looking into Saul's bank records, where they found, inevitably, a raft of deposits from organic seed buyers. If, by this time, Saul didn't know he was under scrutiny, he probably found out on September 20, 2015, when investigators searched his house. Six months later he was in court, admitting to fraud.
Russian gamers, time to pop the champers and lock the door—there's cause for celebration.
In an announcement released this week, the Russian Sports Ministry has recognized competitive video-gaming as an official sport in the country. While the decision may seem like a bid for the hearts and minds of basement-dwelling teens, competitive gaming—commonly referred to as eSports—is a fast-growing and financially lucrative industry, thanks to its ever-increasing popularity.
Russia is not the first country to embrace eSports. Competitive gaming is wildly popular in South Korea, and has been for years. In 2014, the New York Times covered a League of Legendstournament in Seoul that drew 40,000 spectators to an outdoor soccer stadium and offered a $1 million prize to the winning team. Around the globe, eSports competitors and enthusiasts consider South Korea the center of the professional gaming community, and according to some, the South Korean government’s early involvement—the Korean eSports Association (KeSPA) was established in 2000—played a key role in eSports’ growth and popularity.
“Pro gaming exists in its current form and size in large part thanks to the people who made it possible in South Korea,” Dutch pro gamer Manuel Schenkhuizen told the Times.
Sixteen years after KeSPA helped make eSports a mainstream phenomenon in South Korea, the popularity of eSports has spread around the globe. In 2015, Sports Illustrated featured a U.S. League of Legends tournament that brought 12,000 fans to Madison Square Garden, and the rise of streaming services like Twitch has grown the industry even further by allowing enthusiasts to watch tournaments from the comfort of their own home.
As eSports has grown, it’s gained many of the characteristics of traditional sports industries: anti-doping regulations, match-fixing scandals, Mark Cuban, and—as of last month—an official international oversight body. If a sport is defined by how seriously its players and fans take the competition, eSports are definitely a sport.
Of course, legitimacy isn’t the only motivator behind Russia’s official recognition of eSports. The industry is becoming a financial behemoth, with PwC estimating that eSports will generate nearly $500 million in revenue this year. According to the Los Angeles Times, “China’s richest man, Russia’s richest man, the U.S.’s fourth-richest man and a string of American multimillionaires” all have financial stakes in the industry. The Russian alluded to by the Times is Alisher Usmanov, who invested $100 million into Russian eSports club Virtus.pro last year, according to Russia Behind the Headlines. Industry insiders told RBTH that Russian eSports has potential for strong growth over the next few years. Becoming the second country in the world to officially recognize the competitions will certainly help.
But Russia’s official recognition of eSports isn’t just good news for the millionaires investing in the industry, who can now organize events in partnership with the Ministry of Sports. As explained by RT, eSports membership in the registry of sports means players can earn impressive official titles, such as “Master of Sports of Russia,” “Merited Master of Sports of Russia,” and “International Master of Sports.” It remains to be seen how many experience points are required for each title.
Angkor Wat is the most recognizable ruin in Cambodia, but the CALI project has revealed there's much more to be found in the jungle. (Photo: Aleksandr Zykov/CC-BY-SA-2.0)
Last year, the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI) conducted the world’s most extensive archaeological lidar study, scanning nearly 2,000 square kilometers of Cambodian landscape in search of evidence of the medieval Khmer empire. (Lidar is like radar, only with laser lights.) Now, the results of the campaign are being shared with the public, including groundbreaking discoveries of previously undocumented cities.
The findings are so revolutionary that some archaeologists are claiming the work “rewrites history.”
We have entire cities discovered beneath the forest that no one knew were there – at Preah Khan of Kompong Svay and, it turns out, we uncovered only a part of Mahendraparvata on Phnom Kulen [in the 2012 survey]....this time we got the whole deal and it’s big, the size of Phnom Penh big.
The size of these previously undiscovered settlements implies that the Khmer empire may have been the largest empire on Earth during its 12th-century peak. It’s the first clear evidence that Angkor was densely populated, and opens new avenues of investigation into how the civilization built and sustained its cities.
For example, in a post on the official CALI site, Evans describes how the study has added to and enhanced prior knowledge about the layout of the Sambor Prei Kuk temples:
The lidar data adds a whole new dimension though, showing a quite complex system of moats, waterways and other features that had not been mapped in detail before….The data turns out to be extremely valuable archaeologically, and should add a new dimension to our understanding of the development of this pre-Angkorian capital and how it probably persisted as an important center well into the Angkor era.
Many of the findings contradict long-held assumptions about Angkorian technology and history. The complex water systems discovered through the study appear to have been built hundreds of years before the technology behind them was believed to have existed. Additionally, the lack of southern settlements uncovered by the survey call into question the long-held belief that Angkor collapsed after a Thai invasion forced its occupants to flee to the south.
Other archaeologists specializing in southeast Asia and Angkor have commended the study, telling The Guardian that the findings are “thrilling” and claiming the study “[marks] the greatest advance in the past 50 or even 100 years of our knowledge of Angkorian civilization.”
These landmark discoveries occurred through the application of lidar technology, which uses airborne lasers to gather data on the topography of the landscape. This data is then used to create a 3D model of the area scanned and produce highly detailed maps. Evans and his team were inspired by the 2009 use of lidar to map the Mayan site of Caracol, using funding from National Geographic to conduct a smaller lidar survey of Angkor, Phnom Kulen, and Koh Ker in 2012. The 2012 study revealed the first modern evidence of the city of Mahendraparvata, among other significant discoveries, and enabled the team to secure funding from the European Research Council for the 2015 survey.
In areas such as Cambodia and Belize, where dense vegetation obscures evidence of early civilizations on the ground, lidar technology has had a transformative effect on archaeology, as Evans explained in a 2013 editorial in The Diplomat. “It is true that we might have achieved the same results using traditional ground survey campaigns, which have been underway at Angkor since the nineteenth century. Now, however, decades of machete-work are rendered unnecessary by a few hours of flight time,” he writes.
The official results from the 2015 survey will be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Monday, and Evans will also give a talk that evening at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The CALI project will continue its activities, including field verification of the lidar findings, through 2020.
A section from a late 18th re-reaction of the original I Modi. (Photo: Public Domain)
Any pilgrims visiting Vatican City will spend some time in the Raphael Rooms. Decorated with iconic frescoes by Raphael and the artists of his workshop, these reception rooms in the Palace of the Vatican have left generations of tourists awestruck. They may also have inspired awe in the less high-minded.
According to legend, these Vatican showrooms, the apartments of the popes, once contained the now-lost artwork for the western world's first pornographic blockbuster. (Note: explicit imagery accompanies this story.)
The Sala di Costantino is the largest of the rooms. It now depicts scenes from the life of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Some art historians believe that other, more salacious sketches once adorned the walls. If those were still around, this room would be considerably more famous.
Titian's portrait of painted Giulio Romano. (Photo: Public Domain)
Though it is one of the Raphael Rooms, Raphael was dead by the time work began on it. At least some of the work was left in the capable hands of Raphael's pupil, Giulio Romano. Soon much of Italy was buzzing over exactly what those hands were capable of doing. Romano designed palazzos and decorated the apartments of cardinals, but he gained infamy as an artist who drew a series of 16 explicit paintings of lovers in different sexual positions, or “postures.”
According to Lynne Lawner, an art historian who focuses on Renaissance Italy, “In 1523 Giulio began the decoration of the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. It is said that in a moment of anger at Clement VII for a tardy payment, Giulio drew the sixteen postures on the walls of that unlikely place.”
A reproduction of Satyr et Nymphe, one of the Sixteen Postures. (Photo: Public Domain)
This is not quite as insane as it sounds. Sex, art, and the Catholic church spent the 16th century as closely entwined as the lovers in Romano's paintings. Rumor has it that Raphael was to be made a cardinal by Pope Leo X, but that he died of a fever caused by a night of sexual excess with his young mistress before the Pope could bring these plans to fruition. Records show that houses owned by the church or its officials were often occupied by young women with no last names, most likely the mistresses of church officials, kept quietly and anonymously near their lovers.
Even erotic art on the walls of the Vatican was not unprecedented. In 1516, a certain Cardinal Bibbiena earned himself a place in church history by commissioning Raphael himself to decorate a bathroom with naked nymphs bathing while anatomically correct satyrs spied on them.
Subsequent godly tenants whitewashed the bathroom, but art eventually won out over religion and Raphael's paintings were uncovered and preserved—though to this day not made available to the general public. (Some art historians believe that Romano was actually commissioned to paint the sixteen erotic postures for Bibbiena, not Pope Clement VII, and that they depict 16 famous Roman courtesans–a sort of 16th century pin-up calendar.)
Raphael's portrait of Cardinal Bibbiena. (Photo: Public Domain)
A cardinal’s bathroom is a private place. The erotic frescoes on the walls of the Sala di Costantino–whether commissioned or drawn out of spite–would have been kept equally private, no matter who trooped through the other Raphael rooms. Perhaps no one would ever have heard of Romano’s paintings if it weren’t for the efforts of another artist. Marcantonio Raimondi was a talented copyist, engraver, and print maker who made his reputation copying and printing Raphael's works. He modified that reputation by copying Romano's erotic paintings.
“The Sixteen Postures,” as they came to be known, circulated around Rome. If the church had not been involved before, it stepped in now—to its own great cost. Pope Clement VII tossed Raimondi in jail, but the copyist had powerful friends, and they petitioned the church on his behalf.
Among those appealing for Raimondi’s release was Pietro Aretino, a poet, satirist, and utterly fearless human being. The church's reaction had piqued his curiosity. As he wrote to a friend later in his life, “After I arranged for Pope Clement to release Raimondi . . . I desired to see those pictures which has caused the [Vatican] to cry out that their creators should be crucified.”
Inspired by the explicit engravings, Aretino decided to add his own contribution. For each image, he composed a sonnet gleefully describing the scene. His words and Raimondi's images were combined in a booklet that welcomed readers with Aretino's introduction, “Come view this you who like to fuck, without being disturbed in that sweet enterprise.”
The booklet had many names. I Modi or “The Fashion,” is the most popular. It's also known as Aretino's Postures, The Sixteen Pleasures, and De Omnibus Veneris Schematibus in Latin. Whatever it was called, people loved it. With the help of the printing press, the triumvirate (or trinity) of Romano, Raimondi, and Aretino had created the first printed porn blockbuster. Their work was first widely disseminated, then widely pirated, and finally widely imitated.
People all over Europe paid for the scandalous little book, but I Modi did more than just make money. It was one of those rare works of pornography that jumped from niche to popular culture. Like Fifty Shades of Grey or Deep Throat, it became something which could be discussed, if only as a joke, in polite society. Some believe that Shakespeare snuck a reference to I Modi into A Winter's Tale, when he talks about “that rare Italian master, Julio Romano.” There was even a 16th century Italian phrasebook aimed at English tourists that allowed them to ask for the “works of Aretino” at Italian booksellers, according to Eric Berkowitz, who hunted down a copy for his book, Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire.
Illegally-printed copies of I Modi remained popular for over a hundred years. There's no way to know how many were printed. Sadly, there will be no modern-day revival of the work. Churches and governments hunted down and destroyed the copies as enthusiastically as people bought them. (This, ironically, might have been what kept the book in print for so long.) Only the sonnets survive intact.
Fragments of the I Modi or The Sixteen Pleasures as found in the British Museum (Photo: Public Domain)
Except for a few fragments in the British Museum, carefully cropped to remove any genitalia, the original images are gone. If the original paintings were the obscene work of an enraged artist, it’s not surprising they were destroyed. If they were commissioned, it’s also likely they were quietly eliminated. The church that whitewashed the work of Raphael, and painted draperies over Michelangelo’s male nudes in the Sistine Chapel wasn’t going to carefully preserve pictures of people having sex.The closest we can get to the erotic works of Giulio Romano are 18th century recreations of the 16 original engravings.
To pay tribute to the literary blockbuster he inspired, perhaps it’s best to go to Vatican City and head to the Sala di Costantino, with its scenes from the life of the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity and took much of the western world with him. Maybe behind the scene of Constantine's vision of the cross, or his baptism, you might see the faint lines of a very different kind of painting.
Thanks to smartphones, humans have the ability to navigate up-to-date, geo-located global maps with astonishing ease. As cartographer Justin O’Beirne puts it, “Today’s best and most popular maps are with everyone, all of the time.”
But, given that most of the world is using either a Google map or Apple Maps, are we seeing the same thing?
To answer this question, O'Beirne begun an in-depth comparison of the two maps, publishing the first essay in a planned four-part series this month. As it turns out, the two maps have some striking differences in what they show their users.
To compare the two maps, O’Beirne chose three major cities (New York, San Francisco, and London) that can reasonably be assumed to have dense, complete maps and be inclusive of a wide variety of places of interest. Each city’s map was centered on a major landmark approximately in the center of the city (the Empire State Building, Patricia’s Green, and Nelson’s Column, respectively). For each city, O’Beirne created 18 maps at different zoom levels in each app—a total of 54 maps.
With his 54 maps in-hand, O’Beirne compared the way Google and Apple display cities, roads, and places at various zoom levels. And he’s found that while many might assume that the maps are essentially interchangeable, they actually are strikingly different.
Basically, Apple Maps tends to label cities more than roads, while Google Maps does the opposite, although both maps show the same number of roads in two-thirds of all zoom levels. So Apple Maps is a good bet if you need to know the names and locations of the suburbs of New York City, but Google Maps will tell you where I-95 is.
But what’s really interesting is the major differences between the places of interest each map shows. Google Maps is heavily biased towards transit—although, oddly, it doesn’t show every transit station—while Apple Maps tends to highlight landmarks. In fact, on average, only about 15 percent of the places of interest shown on any map are the same for Apple and Google, with Apple tending to show a greater variety of places, as well as more shops and restaurants.
As O’Beirne points out, the maps show “two very different views of the world” — one focused on places to go to, the other on how to get there.
So, if you’ve ever found yourself earnestly arguing that Apple Maps is the better way to find a restaurant, or Google Maps’ subway directions are more accurate, good news! It may not be entirely in your head. And whether or not you have a strong preference for what kind of information is presented on your map, the apps’ capacity for constant updates and localization make them indispensable whether or not your favorite Thai restaurant appears. In future essays, O’Beirne plans to examine the two maps’ labels, details, and overall styling; it’ll be interesting to see if one map proves decisively better for a seeker of the curious and wondrous.
The small housing collective has operated out of two Victorian-era houses in the Woodbridge neighborhood of Detroit, since 1993. After establishing themselves as a non-profit organization, the Wayne Association of Collective Housing, better known as Trumbullplex after the two houses being situated on Trumbull Street, the group has spent the past two decades maintaining and developing their pair of properties, and the surrounding city lots, as hubs of creativity, art, and activism. Among the things the collective has created are a number of urban gardens, a multi-use theater space, and a zine library.
While the Trumbullplex Collective has only officially occupied the land that holds their two houses, their activities have spread to the unused lots surrounding the buildings as well over the years. According to the Detroit Metro Times, the collective claims to have been trying unsuccessfully to purchase the extra land from the city for decades. But now, after another local developer tried to bid on a pair of the neighboring lots, they have finally succeeded.
Detroit developer Alex Pereira, known for installing statues of children’s characters in front of his buildings, recently tried to buy up the lots for $5,000-a-piece, stating that they would be used for mixed development. However, according to the Trumbullplex Collective, he told them he would be open to turning them into parking lots, if he could get the permits. Trumbullplex put in a counter-bid that matched Pereira’s, and the city accepted theirs over Pereira’s, saying that their intentions had the most community benefit.
The anarchist collective is expected to continue using their neighboring lots as they have been, as community gardens and gathering spaces, but no matter what, the decision is finally, officially, theirs to make.
In Emlagh bog in County Meath, Ireland, which was once at the juncture of three different kingdoms, a turf cutter has found a giant knob of “bog butter,” buried hundreds of years ago and preserved to this day.
“It did smell like butter,” one person who held the giant lump told UTV Ireland.
“Bog butter” is butter that has been buried in a bog. The Irish Times describes it as a “creamy white dairy product, which smells like a strong cheese.” The earliest known examples date back almost 2,000 years, but there are records of people burying butter as recently as the 1800s. This one is estimated to be an early example but will be studied further to date it.
Why would anyone bury butter in a bog? Often, to preserve it: butter made hundreds of years ago, without salt, wouldn’t last long, but the cool, low oxygen environment of the bog could extend its life. Bog butter is sometimes found encased in wooden containers or animal hide, to protect it as well.
This hunk of bog butter had no case, though. It may have been buried for a more formal reason—as an offering to the gods, who might keep the place it was buried safe.
Even after hundreds of years, it could still be edible, although it’s not clear that it would taste good or that it’s a good idea to eat butter meant for gods.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Careri borrowed the map, along with other knowledge, from New Spain local Don Carlos de Siguenza. (Image: Harvard Library/Public Domain)
Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri was the original disillusioned lawyer who quit to travel the world.
In A Voyage Round the World (Giro del Mondo), a six-volume set of travel accounts published in 1699 and 1700, the Italian adventurer claims to have visited Persian mints, witnessed fights on the island of Formosa in the Indies and brought two bales of carpets to Indostan.It sounds like an incredible global tour, but there’s no saying how much of his travels he contrived (some have considered them if not entirely, then mostly fictitious).
Either way, Careri, who lived from 1651 to 1725, was a pioneering world traveler among Europeans. He journeyed via merchant ships, not for profit but for leisure and adventure. On a five-year international tour, he voyaged to Egypt, Turkey, and Persia before swinging by India, taking a stroll along the Great Wall of China, then roughing the seas en route to the Philippines and New Spain. Or at least, that's what we're led to believe.
Careri left his cushy job as a lawyer to set off into the horizon, financing his trip largely by buying and reselling items as he went. Did he get passed over for a promotion? Turned down as a partner? Hard to say, but he decided it was time to leave the office and see the world.
One stop along his trip, in 1697, was New Spain, or today’s Mexico, which comprises volume six of his series. Careri's descriptions of local culture in “New Spain” have been considered among the more convincing of his travel tales; Prussian geographer, Baron Von Humboldt, confirmed that his descriptions of Mexico and Acapulco possessed local charm only achievable through ocular witness.
The map above, copied from the work of Don Carlos de Siguenza, a Spanish intellectual and geographer who spent his life in New Spain, looks more like a board game than an atlas. It seems there should be some instruction somewhere: “You got scurvy: move back five places,” or “You have been named a foreign king: you win the game!” The chunk of script in the upper left gives attribution to Siguenza, who was in contact with Careri, and used him as an avenue through which to publish and disseminate ideas. Careri's correspondence and consultation with Siguenza during his time in New Spain may have been key in enhancing the volume's accuracy on the region's history and customs.
It is less a map, and more an illustrated guide of things one might happen upon along "the road the ancient Mexicans travell’d when they came from the Mountains to inhabit the Lake” in the late 17th century. Such things include: "papantla, an herb with broad leaves"; "tzompanco, the place of the death's head"; "temazcal titlan"; "Chapultepec, The Hill of Grasshoppers"; "Xaltopozauhcan, where the sand rises"; "atlycalaquian, a whirl pool where the water is swallow’d"; and "Azlan, A place of Megpies where the Mexicans were call’d Aztlanechi". You’ll have to rotate it to fully appreciate every component of the map’s circumference.
Tucked among his observations about "horrid Sacrifices" and singing nuns, you’ll find the map below. Careri begins his New Spain leg of his around-the-world journey in Acapulco, in what is the last volume of his Travels Round the World. He details the inns and monasteries at which he stays the night, and adds, “As for the city of Acapulco, I think it might more properly be call’d a poor Village of Fishermen, than the chief Mart of the South Sea, and Port for the Voyage to China.” He mentions meager houses of Wood, Mud, and Straw, and natives who he describes as “Blacks and Mulattoes.” Careri reluctantly mentions the city’s few virtues, before delving into the salaries of the King’s curate and port’s chief Magistrate.
Also included in Careri's first chapter on New Spain is “An Hidrographicall draught of Mexico, as it lies in its Lakes, closely detailing the mountains the rivers surrounding the Lake of Mexico” (which Careri mentions is courtesy of a "French Ingenier" named Adrian Boot). Later, there are portraits such as that of “Tlaloc, the God of Rain,” “Quauhtimoc X king” and “a Mexican Souldier” (with a decapitated head hanging loosely at his waist).
Whether or not Careri passed through all the places recounted in his travel memoirs, he is certainly not lacking in detail—names, numbers, dates, arithmetic, geographical bearings, lists of Mexican monarchs, and interesting numerical-alphabetic conversions. One wonders how his publisher's fact-checking system functioned—but no matter. If you’d like to do your own fact-checking, you can find early editions of all six volumes, or just go straight to the textonline, if you have the patience for distinguishing an “s” from an “f”.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Hyderabadi chicken biryani, a fragrant mix of rice, spices and meat. (Photo: Garrett Ziegler/CC BY 2.0)
Within the Indian subcontinent, the spiced rice and meat dish known as biryani is not just a delicious dinner. It's a multinational phenomenon, an ever-growing set of memes, and the focus of a culinary cult.
Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi households spend hours, sometimes days, cooking biryani on the most special occasions. Restaurants in every corner of India dedicate themselves to specializing in only biryani. In early 2015, Buzzfeed India published an article entitled “23 Reasons Having Biryani Is Better Than Having A Boyfriend,” urging its readers to “stop chasing after a bae and get yourself a baeryani.”
For all its popularity in South Asia, however, biryani fever has not gone beyond the subcontinent, to places where Indian food is otherwise extremely prevalent—such as the United States. Sure, plenty of Indian restaurants outside India will have it on the menu, but few count their biryani preparations among the most popular dishes or as their claim to fame. While dishes such as naan and samosas have enjoyed great success in foreign cultures, one of the most celebrated dishes in India remains relatively anonymous overseas.
What makes biryani so popular in India, and why didn’t its popularity translate beyond its borders? How is biryani India’s best kept secret?
Biryani is a warming, spicy dish that is typically served with raita to cool the taste buds down. (Photo: Dheerajk88/CC BY-SA 4.0)
To figure out why the biryani phenomenon is exclusive to the subcontinent, we have to get to the bottom of what makes biryani so addictively delicious in the first place. The answer lies in part with the nature of the dish: biryani is fragrant, spiced rice that has been parboiled and then cooked with meat, usually chicken or goat. The rice gets its robust flavor from a variety of spices, including ginger, garlic, nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, saffron and rosewater, as well as from the meat itself.
Quora user Ananvita Bhattacharya boils biryani’s popularity down to three reasons: it’s incredibly flavorful; it acts as a complete meal in itself, and its versatility means it can appeal to a wide range of ages and palates.
Although biryani is widespread across the subcontinent today, it had much more exclusive origins. While mentions of “mutton rice” or Oon Soru in Tamil literature go as far back as 348 BCE, the term “biryani” and the closest predecessor to its modern incarnation seems to originate around India’s Mughal era. According to Pratiba Khan in her cookbook simply titled, Biryani, the dish is thought to have been brought over from Persia by the Muslim conquerors who settled and ruled India, and the word is said to come from the Persian word for rice, birinj. Its expensive, hard-to-come-by ingredients meant that biryani was a dish for the kings.
The fact that biryani was a dish for kings and princes might explain why, outside of the subcontinent and select Islamic countries, it doesn’t taste quite right. Biryani contains pricey saffron; the higher the quality of the saffron used, the better the biryani turns out. Restaurants that don’t specialize in biryani may use saffron too sparingly, or even fake saffron to cut costs.
Another factor is speed. The dish was prepared for royal banquets, often over the course of several days of slow cooking. Since that wouldn’t make sense on the turnover that most restaurants have (unless they specialize in biryani), biryani recipes are either cut down to have faster cooking times, or the dish made in batches and left out for a few days. The end product, as a result, tastes not quite like the original dish as it is meant to be.
The biggest factor in why biryani tastes inauthentic outside of its home countries, however, is to do with the protection of the sacred family biryani recipe. “The reason biryani is such a closely-kept secret in families is because it is a recipe that has been perfected over time,” says Aima Khan, a Pakistani-American whose family’s biryani recipe has been in her family for around three generations.
Khan’s family received the recipe from an elderly cook in her grandfather’s hometown. The cook’s biryani recipe had quite the reputation, but he didn’t have his own family to pass it down to, as was tradition. Since he was good friends with Khan’s grandfather, on her grandparents’ wedding day, he decided to part with his cherished recipe. “He felt that the best way for him to leave some sort of legacy was to pass down his famous recipe,” explains Khan.
Biryani recipes are a point of pride, often used to bolster a family reputation. “The best way to make a good impression is to serve an amazing biryani,” says Khan. Weddings are an especially good time for this. “In a way, biryani is used as the sort of trademark of a family. And who doesn't want to be represented in the best way possible?”
Each family recipe differs slightly from the next in terms of ingredients, and families take pride in the differences and particularities of their recipes. “Each of these ingredients, believe it or not, say a little something about the family that [the recipe] came from,” says Khan. “This is why it’s very difficult for families to share their recipes, because they need to be able to trust that the next family will be able to make the dish just as well, if not better than the one that is sharing the recipe.”
Families guard their recipes closely, for fear of the fact that they will be altered or incorrectly prepared by others. “There’s nothing more heart-wrenching than to watch your cherished family recipe be ruined by someone who does not appreciate the dish enough to prepare it properly,” says Khan.
Of course, there are plenty of resources out there offering up “authentic” biryani recipes, such as cookbooks packed with regional recipes, and more recently, reddit threads claiming to reveal users’ family recipes. But for now, India holds onto its best kept secret for a little longer.
Birth, death, decomposition, and a return to the earth—the endless cycle of which almost all of us are a part. But a small percentage of creatures attain immortality through the sometimes kitschy, somewhat macabre, art of taxidermy.
Alas, Benjamin Franklin’s angora cat wasn’t one of them.
Charles Willson Peale is usually remembered as the father of American painting, but he was also a pioneer of taxidermy in early America. However, he was still new to the art when he attempted to give his friend’s cat the gift of everlasting “life.” “An attempt was made to preserve it,” Peale writes in his autobiography, which he finished in April 1826, less than a year before his death at age 86. “But for want of knowledge of a proper mode to preserve dead animals, it was lost.” Apparently, Peale’s lack of skill left the door open to opportunistic “vermen,” insects that ate away at the carcass. Peale had yet to learn how to thwart the whims of hungry “dermests and moths (the enemies of most Museums),” he writes. The source documents remain silent on how Dr. Franklin took the news of his pet’s second demise.
But Peale was a quick study and his later refinements came to help scientists and civilians prevent pets and specimens from rotting. This also became central to another item on the long list of this polymath’s accomplishments: Opening the first natural history museum in America.
Exhuming the First American Mastodon, by Charles Willson Peale, 1806. (Photo: Peale Museum/Public Domain)
Peale’s ascension to museum keeper signified the culmination of an eclectic career. He started out as an indentured servant apprenticed to a saddle maker at age 13 in his native Maryland. Peale soon became quite skilled. But ever the ambitious craftsman, he added silversmithing and clock-making.
At age 21, sensing that his life should amount to more than a pile of leather and gears, Peale took up portrait painting and made a stunningly successful leap from artisan to artist (and an accompanying jump up the social ladder) upon moving to America’s then capital city, Philadelphia. There, he associated himself with the gentry he painted and became well acquainted with Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and the other founding fathers.
Despite his intelligence and many talents, Peale was forever short of cash. With 17 children to support, he constantly sought new opportunities. Some mastodon bones discovered in the mid-1780s presented the mammoth opportunity he’d been searching for when Peale’s brother-in-law offhandedly remarked that people would pay to see them. That simple statement sparked the idea of creating a museum of natural history.
“Peale was a pioneer in terms of thinking about what a museum might be in a democratic republic,” says David Brigham, President and CEO of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), another institution Peale founded, in 1805, that houses his most iconic painting, The Artist in his Museum. “He’s been thinking about these things from the 1780s forward, and he created two of the most important cultural institutions in the young republic—Peale’s Museum and the PAFA. He really had a tremendous impact,” Brigham says.
The Philadelphia Museum, also called Peale’s Museum, which opened in July 1786, presented preserved animals and other natural specimens carefully arranged according to the Linnaean taxonomy alongside portraits of important figures from the American Revolution. Peale intuitively understood that art and science overlap and that a dose of entertainment makes learning more palatable to everyone. Having been compared both to circus showman P.T. Barnum and to Joseph Smithson, the scholarly founder of the Smithsonian Institution, Peale’s dynamic and sometimes domineering personality sits him somewhere between these two extremes.
He writes in his autobiography of using the necessity of moving the collection in 1794 from its original location in his home at Lombard and Third Streets into Philosophical Hall (roughly half a mile away) as a way of creating a buzz. “But to take advantage of public curiosity, he contributed to make a very considerable parade of the articles…. And as Boys generally are fond of parade, he collected all the boys of the neighbourhood, & he began a range of them at the head of which was carried on men’s shoulders the American Buffalo—then followed the Panthers, Tyger Cats and a long string of Animals of smaller size carried by the boys…. It was fine fun for the Boys.”
It must have been quite a show for regular Philadelphians, too, watching a cavalcade of dead animals waltz past, and Brigham says that in providing a spectacle as a way for potential museums-goers to engage with science and the natural world, Peale “was synthesizing popular and more scholarly ways."
"To call him either a Smithson or a Barnum is not right; he had the idea that those two things are very comfortable together,” Brigham says.
Peale charged 25 cents for a single visit (about $6 in today’s money) and established the concept of museum membership by offering an annual subscription that allowed unlimited visits and entry to special events and lectures.
Charles Willson Peale self-portrait, c. 1791. (Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Through his museum, Peale’s mission became to decipher the natural order underpinning disparate intellectual pursuits while educating anyone who could afford the entry fee, says David C. Ward, senior historian at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Ward describes the period between 1785 and 1805, when Peale taught himself the museum business, as a time of intense “ferment, during which everything is up in the air. They’re creating institutions, the constitution, even the street grid in Philadelphia and ordering their life experience. It’s kind of an incredible American story,” he says. Peale was on the front lines of this exciting time. “He creates this museum out of his head and creates ‘A World in Miniature.’ The specimens became analog to the human world, with man surrounding the natural world and controlling and understanding it,” Ward says.
And that heightened understanding of our world through these specimens continues today. Ornithologist Scott Edwards, curator of ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, says older specimens can serve “as a snapshot, or time capsule, of the environment in a specific time and place.” Using technology far beyond even Peale’s fertile imagination, Edwards can analyze cells from old specimens, such as two golden pheasants donated by George Washington and preserved by Peale in 1787 that are still on display at the MCZ to sequence DNA, measure levels of environmental chemical exposure, and answer a host of other questions about how species change over time.
Peale's painting of George Washington, c. 1780-82. (Photo: Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)
And while efforts are underway to digitize the entirety of the MCZ’s collections to make them accessible to anyone, anywhere—an endeavor Edwards thinks “would impress our pre-digital ancestor, Peale”—there’s simply no way to replace the experience of seeing preserved specimens in person. “If people still appreciate the difference between the image and actual specimen, museums have a long future,” Edwards says.
As for his contribution to taxidermy, Peale’s main innovation was arsenic, a technique he likely learned about and improved upon based on German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster’s “Catalog of the Animals of North America,” published in London in 1771. Peale used the poison in preserving Washington’s pheasants and nearly all his other mounts, despite experiencing some adverse health effects. The caustic and highly toxic chemical proved a harsh solution to his preservation problem but is responsible for the birds remaining intact today. According to Jeremiah Trimble, collection manager at the MCZ, the pheasants “are a bit faded” but otherwise in excellent condition. “They still have the original labels from the Peale Museum,” he says.
With his formula finally sorted (his notes reveal a lengthy and no doubt foul-smelling process), Peale was able to stock his museum with all manner of fauna from near and far. No mere curiosity cabinet, Peale’s Museum was a decidedly scientific institution that serves as the mould from which most modern museums are still cast today.
The worst mass shooting in American history unfolded early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando, where 50 died after a gunman stormed the building and opened fire.
Across the world, memorials and vigils have been taking place, from buildings lit up in rainbow colors to show solidarity with the LGBT community to moments of silence for the victims.
