In 1957, before Kermit the Frog became a household name, a prototype of the famous Muppet appeared in D.C.-area advertisements as a violent coffee lover named Wilkins.
Muppets creator Jim Henson produced these ads for the now-defunct Wilkins Coffee brand. Each was 10 seconds, including a two-second shot of the product, which meant Henson had precious little time to make them catchy. His solution? Have one character attack the other.
In the ads, Wilkins—who bears a striking resemblance to Kermit the Frog—tries to convince another proto-Muppet, Wontkins to drink Wilkins Coffee. Wontkins almost always refuses. In retaliation, Wilkins shoots him, stabs him, or otherwise inflicts physical harm upon him.
The commercials became a sensation: Henson later said that, of all ads in the D.C. area, "we were the number one, the most popular commercial." From 1957 to 1961, he made over 179 spots. In fact, by the end of 1958, he was selling vinyl puppets of Wilkins and Wontkins, which came with the description: "Hey Kids! I’m Wilkins—he’s Wontkins. You see us on TV!”
Wilkins and Wontkins grew so popular that Henson soon brought them to a national audience. He started filming and producing advertisements for other companies, including Esskay Meats and Krant Milk, often re-shooting the same commercial with different product names.
"We had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time," he said. "I was making a lot of money."
Other characters were soon brought on board, too. Don't miss Henson's Purina Dog Chow commercials, starring Rowlf, or his ads featuring a Cookie Monster-esque "Wheeler Stealer."
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In 1897, Paul Doumer arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam. A 40-something French government worker fresh off a big professional failure—he resigned as minister of finance after his scheme for a new income tax failed—Doumer had a new job to try his hand at. He’d been appointed the Governor-General of French Indochina, a group of colonies in Southeast Asia that included what is now Vietnam.
Doumer set about outfitting Indochina—and especially Hanoi, the capital—with modern infrastructure befitting property of France. By the turn of the century, a typical colonist in Hanoi lived on a wide avenue lined with trees. Home was a spacious villa with many rooms and fine European things—including, notably, a toilet.
Ah, the toilet. What better way to distinguish French Hanoi, Doumer thought. The vast sewer system that ran under the French section of town—and the smaller one serving the overcrowded neighborhoods where the Vietnamese inhabitants lived—was a symbol of cleanliness and progress.
Imagine the dismay, then, when rats began emerging from the drains.
It turns out that when Doumer’s colonial government laid more than nine miles of sewage pipe beneath Hanoi, it inadvertently created nine miles of cool, dark rodent paradise, where the pests could breed without fear of predators. And when they got hungry, the rats had direct access to the city’s ritziest real estate via a subterranean superhighway. Under the streets of French Hanoi, rats multiplied exponentially—and then skittered to the surface.
As if it wasn’t enough that these furry invaders disrupted the colonists’ illusion of European tranquility in Asia, cases of the bubonic plague started popping up, and rats were suspected of carrying the disease. Something had to be done.
A solution was devised. Vietnamese rat hunters, hired by the colonial government, would descend into the sewers to hunt the rats down, and be paid for each one eliminated.
And so began The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre.
The bloodshed started swiftly. In the last week of April, 1902, 7,985 rats were killed—and that was just the beginning. The assassins continued to gain experience in the month of May, pushing the death toll above 4,000 each day. By the end of the month, the numbers were even more astounding. On May 30 alone, 15,041 rats met their end. In June, daily counts topped 10,000, and on June 21, the number was 20,112.
Let’s let that sink in: 20,112 rats killed in a single day.
Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how the rats were killed—that detail has been lost to history. We only know about the rat hunt at all because in the ‘90s historian Michael Vann was in France, researching French colonialism, when he came upon a file labeled “Destruction of Animals: Rats.” Inside was some confusing, disorganized paperwork listing the number of rats exterminated in Hanoi around the turn of the century. The file was enticing–what on earth happened to these poor rats?—so Vann started working to piece together the full story.
“One had to enter the dark and cramped sewer system, make one’s way through human waste in various forms of decay, and hunt down a relatively fierce wild animal which could be carrying fleas with the bubonic plague or other contagious diseases. This is not even to mention the probable existence of numerous other dangerous animals, such as snakes, spiders, and other creatures, that make this author’s skin crawl with anxiety.”
Eventually, the colonists realized that, even with this small army of paid rat killers, they were failing to make a dent in the rat population.
They proceeded to Plan B, offering any enterprising civilian the opportunity to get in on the hunt. A bounty was set—one cent per rat—and all you had to do to claim it was submit a rat’s tail to the municipal offices. That way, the government wouldn’t be overrun with bulky rat corpses. “I always think about that,” Dr. Vann says. “Who is the poor guy counting all these rat tails?”
The French were especially pleased with this arrangement because they’d been encouraging entrepreneurialism in Vietnam. And at first, it seemed to be working. Tails poured in. French ingenuity triumphed again.
But then there started to be curious sightings, all around town: Rats, alive and healthy, running around without their tails.
It turned out the hunters would rather amputate a live animal’s tail than take a healthy rat, capable of breeding and creating so many more rats—with those valuable tails—out of commission. There were also reports that some Vietnamese were smuggling foreign rats into the city. And then the final straw: Health inspectors discovered, in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, pop-up farming operations dedicated to breeding rats.
Apparently this was not what the French meant by entrepreneurialism. The bounty was scrapped, and the city’s residents resigned themselves to coexisting with the pests.
The French were right about one thing, though: Those rats really were carrying bubonic plague. In 1906, with rats left to multiply in the sewers unchecked, there was an outbreak in Hanoi. At least 263 people died, most of them Vietnamese. Doumer, meanwhile, went home to France, where he was celebrated as the most effective Governor-General of Indochina to date. He went on to become president.
“It’s sort of a morality tale for the arrogance of modernity, that we put so much faith into science and reason and using industry to solve every problem,” Vann says. “This is the same kind of mindset that lead to World War I—the idea that the machine gun, because it kills so efficiently, is going to lead to a quick war. And what that actually lead to is a long war where many people lost their lives.”
These days, the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre is mostly cited as an example of the “Cobra Effect,” an economic theory about how incentives, in a complex system, can lead to perverse, unintended consequences. Sometimes, it’s trotted out as argument against government intervention of any kind—but Vann says that that kind of misses the point.
So what does he think the lesson is instead? “To watch out for programs being created in situations where where the arrogance is so strong and the power differential is so intense that evidence can be ignored.”
In 1997, Vann went to Vietnam to do archival research on the rat massacre. One day, he reached into the top drawer of a card catalogue dedicated to pre-1954 French-language files, and felt a rat scurry over his hand. Long after the French packed up and left Vietnam, the rats remain.
Meridian, Idaho, is around 5,000 miles west of Europe and, as far as we know, wasn't the site of any Nazi attacks. So it was all the more puzzling recently when Diana Landa found a 1938 Nazi artillery shell in her parents' shed.
Landa found the live explosive in late May while cleaning up. At first, she wasn't quite sure what she had stumbled across. She took it home and stashed it in her own shed before asking around for advice. A coworker who's "like, really into history," suggested she contact authorities, Landa told the Idaho Statesman. The Idaho Historical Society, logically, referred her to the police.
Before long, a team from a nearby U.S. Air Force base came to Landa's home, removed the object, X-rayed it, and destroyed it with a controlled detonation. The 37 mm shell, which had Nazi insignia on it and the propellant still attached, was no more.
"Yeah I don't get to keep it," Landa wrote on Facebook. "Lol Turns out it is highly explosive and they had to come remove it from our property. It's from WWII, have no idea how it got to Idaho and still loaded, but it's pretty crazy."
Landa said her parents have no idea where it came from either. For now, the mystery of the Meridian's Nazi ammo will endure. "Definitely a once in a lifetime experience," Landa said.
Scientists can learn a lot about how prehistoric animals lived and looked based on fossilized bones, but if they want to know how long-extinct animals ate, they need to look at a different kind of fossil. Coprolites, fossilized feces, can reveal the diet and diseases of animals and people, and a new report in the journal Scientific Reports shows there is more than one way to analyze them.
Traditionally, researchers have had to slice coprolites into thin sections to study them in detail—a process that can damage some the contents beyond recognition. Scientists at Uppsala University in Sweden teamed up with colleagues at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France and bombarded two prehistoric coprolites with strong X-rays to and create 3D digital models. Now researchers can peer inside the 230-million-year-old fossils without destroying them, and easily identify structures and even whole body parts.
The two coprolites in the study come from Poland, and the partially digested food found inside is helping the scientists figure out where the depositor sat in the food web. One coprolite had nothing but beetle parts, from three different species, so the unknown creature that made it was probably a picky insectivore. The other contained part of a fish and crushed shells from bivalves. The researchers suspect a lungfish, the remains of which were found nearby, may have been the predator in question.
These two coprolites are just the beginning, the study's lead author, Martin Qvarnström, said in a press release. Now that the technique, known as synchrotron tomography, has been tested, "the next step will be to analyze all types of coprolites from the same fossil locality in order to work out who ate what (or whom)."
Foreigners might not be allowed in the small town of Vilyuchinsk on Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia, but that rule doesn’t seem to apply to lost bears.
In a video posted by the Siberian Times, a large brown bear is seen galloping through the streets of the former submarine-manufacturing town. The town, which is surrounded by water and wilderness, was known for nuclear submarine construction. It was supposed to be closed in 2003, but it continues operate. In recent times, the port has become a hub for the local fishing industry, which undoubtedly had a hand in attracting the bear.
While it’s unclear what exactly drew the bear into the town, in one portion of the video, it can be seen racing relatively close to some locals, seemingly being chased by a dog.
Eventually local rangers were able to chase the bear back into the wilderness. According to TheSiberian Times, bears have been wandering into urban centers more and more often, reflecting a loss of normal food sources.
Chambers, the plaintiff, was seeking a permanent injunction against the defendant, God, whom Chambers blamed in the suit for causing various natural disasters. The lawsuit further accused God of the crime of failing to stop “terroristic threats.” In the complaint, filed in Douglas County District Court, Chambers also stated that he had tried to contact God about these matters on multiple occasions, but without success.
Of course, as even Fox News pointed out at the time, the state senator was direct about the fact that he had no real expectation of a victory over the Almighty. Instead, he'd filed to try to make a broader point about the value of frivolous lawsuits. In the end, though, Chambers’ suit was thrown out of court not because it was frivolous per se, but because God had no fixed address at which he could be served notice.
Chambers' lawsuit may have gone nowhere, but it did serve as a reminder that if you want to, anyone can try to sue God—even if winning might take a miracle.
“There’s nothing about the basic requirements of a complaint that suggest that you can’t sue God,” says the Georgetown University legal scholar Naomi Mezey. In the U.S. legal system, Mezey says, it's relatively easy to bring a legitimate complaint against anyone, so long as you can meet the basic standards. While the exact rules vary from court to court, typically those standards include a named defendant, a relevant jurisdiction, details of the alleged wrongdoing, and proof of notice to the defendant of the lawsuit.
“Notice is in some ways the most banal of these requirements, [but] that is in fact an important part of our Constitutional right to due process,” says Mezey. “It feels minor and technical, but on the other hand it is a very important Constitutional guarantee that things do not get litigated against you without your being notified of them.”
It turns out it's this inability to be served notice of a lawsuit that ultimately prevents most courts, like the one in the Chambers case, from allowing legal claims against God to proceed. Still, as Mezey notes, if you believe that God is everywhere, then questions of jurisdiction are at least up for debate—the deity, one could argue, has at least minimum contact with every state and county in the nation. “This is called personal jurisdiction. So maybe that question of personal jurisdiction isn’t so hard if you accept that God is omnipresent.”
Consider another case from 1971. In that one, a man named Gerald Mayo attempted to sue Satan (and his staff) for placing obstacles in his path and causing him general misery. Mayo's case was similarly dismissed because there was nowhere to serve the Devil.
Clearly, serving notice against God (or the Devil) is tough, but there may be some ways around it. In Chambers’ case, he argued that since God is omniscient, he would of course have known about the lawsuit, thus fulfilling the notice requirement. And Mezey proposes an even more sweeping solution. “Maybe you say, God is not a person, therefore due process is not required for God.”
Even if one were to convince a court to hear a case against God, there is one other problem, and that is the issue of how to enforce a ruling for the plaintiff. “You can win a lawsuit, but then you need to get that lawsuit enforced,” says Mezey. “So every remedy you seek, then needs to be enforced in some way. You know there’s no enforcement in this lawsuit [against God].”
Complaints against God aren’t limited to U.S. courts. There are numerous examples of cases against God, or a god, from a variety of countries around the world. In 2007, a Romanian man serving time for murder tried to sue God for not protecting him from the Devil’s influence, which was turned down because God was not seen as a person in the eyes of Romanian law. In 2016, a case was brought to the courts in the Indian state of Bihar by a lawyer attempting to sue the Hindu god Rama. In that case, the court rejected the suit out of hand, noting that it wasn't "practical."
In the end, lawsuits against God are almost uniformly dismissed by courts. But that doesn't mean that those with enough faith, whether in the system or in the Almighty, won't keep trying to find a way.
From late 1800s to the 1950s, pulp magazines and books offered a seemingly endless churn of detective stories, adventure capers, crime dramas, Westerns, and science fiction tales. Cheaply priced and printed on low-quality wood-pulp paper—hence the name—these publications were as "pulpy" as could be: mass-produced, of questionable quality, and easily digestible. They were also disposable, titillating, and hugely popular: In the 1920s and '30s, some issues sold up to a million copies. They also shared one other characteristic: attention-grabbing cover art.
“Pulp magazine publishers typically used a better-quality wrapper to sell the periodicals, employing talented artists to render dramatic, sensationalist—and sometimes slightly salacious—color cover illustrations that captured gun-wielding gangsters, square-jawed detectives, seductive femme fatales, and damsels in distress in stop-action images,” says Frank Luca, chief librarian at the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami Beach, which is currently hosting the exhibition In the Shadows: American Pulp Cover Art.
The covers on display provide classic examples of the strangely distinctive art form. “Sex and violence were the mainstays of cover art for almost every genre from Westerns, to science fiction, fantasy, and true crime,” says Luca. The pulps were also very much products of their eras, and often relied on stereotypes surrounding both gender and race: hypermasculine American men, damsels in distress, femme fatales, and people of Asian, African, or Middle Eastern descent depicted as "savage or “primitive,” Luca explains.
Given the subject matter and negative reputation, it was common for both illustrators and authors to operate under pseudonyms. A number of well-known writers contributed to them, including Dashiell Hammett (who initially wrote for Black Mask under the pseudonym "Peter Collinson"), Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft, whose short story "The Call of Cthulhu" was first published in Weird Tales.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of cover images from the exhibition, and spoke with Luca about the pulps’ heyday, the eye-catching covers, their surprising impact on literacy, and the enduring appeal of detective stories. The exhibition runs through July 9, 2017.
Who was the target audience for pulp magazines and books?
Judging by the cover art and content, the vast majority of pulps were designed to appeal primarily to a young, lower-middle-class male audience. Many urban youths, immigrants, and other lower- and middle-class males were drawn to the pulps by the vivid cover art—which often featured voluptuous women in need of rescue—and became literate reading popular “adventure,” “spicy,” and “true crime” stories. There were also some “romance” and "confessional" pulp periodicals aiming for a female readership, such as Ideal Love, True Confessions, and All-Story Love Stories, and the Harlequin romance novels had their predecessors.
Who were the illustrators who created these images, and what became of the original works?
There were a number of talented artists who painted the artwork that was put on the covers of pulp magazines, including George Gross, Rafael de Soto, Hugh Joseph Ward, Paul Stahr, and David Berger, among others. There are a number of aficionados who have collected and preserved some of the original artwork, but much has also been lost.
What caused the demise of pulp magazines?
Two major factors contributed to the decline of pulp magazines after their heyday in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. One factor was the challenge posed by competition from comic books. Another was the technological advances in the printing industry that made cover images deriving from photographs cheaper than the reproduction of original painted artwork by pulp cover artists.
What carries on the pulp tradition in popular culture today?
Although the flood of pulp magazines dried up in the late 1950s, pulp paperbacks never completely went away. Harlequin Enterprises, for example, was founded in 1949 as a paperback reprinting company, and continued to serve the “romance” and “women’s fiction” market on into the present. After Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 blockbuster Pulp Fiction helped to rekindle an interest in the “crime” pulps, a number of publishing houses have been capitalizing on that revival of popularity to reprint classic pulps, as well as to publish editions of new or neo-pulp stories. The popularity of the HBO True Detective series is illustrative of the American public’s continuing fascination with this genre.
Underneath Los Angeles, there’s a wealth of fossils from ancient creatures. The conditions in the area were perfect to trap and preserve giant mammals that lived more than ten thousand years ago, and as the Los Angeles Metro authority digs tunnels to accommodate the city’s expanding subway system, workers keep finding more fossil treasures.
Most recently, they uncovered a fossilized hip joint of what was like a Harlan’s ground sloth, one of the species of giant sloth that roamed North and South America in ages past. Compared to the sloths of the today, ancient ground sloths were giant: a Harlan’s ground sloth could have grown to 10 feet in length and weighed 1,500 pounds.
The bones were found 16 feet below Crenshaw Boulevard, the L.A. Metro’s blog, The Source, reports, and will be held by National History Museum of Los Angeles County or another museum.
Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood is blessed with Giddings Plaza, a popular spot for summer concerts and food stands. Like any plaza worth its salt, it also has a three-tiered fountain, which has been described by Yelp reviewers as "delightful," "exquisite," "intimate," and "pretty."
Increasingly, though, another adjective applies: sudsy.
Like all fountains, Giddings Fountain has always experienced the occasional soapy spell. But lately, it's become a more regular target. According to DNAinfo Chicago, the fountain is now filled with foamy bubbles about once per week.
No one is quite sure who's doing it. Public response is usually positive, though: "Toddlers squeal, teens lob lather 'snowballs' at each other, and grown-ups whip out their phones," the outlet reports.
Soaping a fountain is a classic prank—it's cheap and quick, and provides a near-instant payback. Incertaininstances, it's also a pain for city police forces and parks departments, which have to spend time and money rinsing the fountain and chasing down any errant foam.
In this case, though, it's fairly low-impact: Matt Saulka of Fountain Technologies, which services Chicago's public fountains, told DNAinfo that it hasn't caused the fountain any harm. "It's just soap," he said. "It doesn't do anything."
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.
Customers who entered the Pirate’s Den, a 1940s Los Angeles theme restaurant and nightclub, risked becoming mock hostages during dinner. Waiters wearing pirate costumes regularly orchestrated fights that ended with female customers being taken to the restaurant’s “brig” until they screamed, at which point they were released with a “scream diploma.”
Owned by high-profile celebrities like Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, Johnny Weissmuller, and Errol Flynn, the Pirate’s Den became a popular destination for its celebrity sightings. But despite its upscale clientele, the restaurant’s pirate theme held strong: in addition to "kidnapping" its clientele, it featured a swearing parrot named Matey and managers who carried bullwhips in order to discipline the waiting staff (“the crew”). Interestingly, it was a controversy about the price of food (a man claimed that the Pirate’s Den overcharged him and his friends for beers and sandwiches), rather than the mock abductions of its customers, that eventually lost it favor with the Los Angeles public.
That Los Angeles served as the site of such a strange nightclub should be no surprise. The city, which now teems with stores built in the shape of giant donuts, submarines, hotdogs, and more, was the birthplace of the modern theme restaurant. In the early 20th century, according to historian Charles Perry, set designers looking for paying gigs often found work turning ordinary restaurants into theatrical establishments. The cinematic nature of venues like the Pirate’s Den also fit with the Hollywood mold—as movies took off, tourists came to the growing city expecting wild entertainment. Elaborately designed restaurants sprang up in order to capitalize on the frenzy.
Theme restaurants also became popular in L.A. in order to combat the overwhelming homogeneity of menus at the time. According to the Los Angeles Times: “When every place in town was serving steak, fried chicken and grilled cheese sandwiches, a colorful theme could help a restaurant stand out.”
Early theme restaurants included Baron Long's Ship Café, a.k.a. Cabrillo's, which opened in 1905 and was located on a boat; the Ye Bull Pen Inn, where customers ate in wood stalls; the Green Mill, whose building was designed to look like a windmill; and the Pink Rat Café, which "offered gothic castle decor, waiters dressed like pirates and shimmy dancing."
One of the most elaborate was the Jail Café on Sunset Boulevard, which was designed to imitate a prison. Customers ducked down a long hallway until they reached the main dining area—a large room containing rows of mock prison cells. Waiters dressed as convicts sat them at tables located in these cells, locked the door, and served them a choice of chicken, steak, or lobster. In keeping with the jail theme, customers were forbidden from using utensils; they ate with their hands, reminiscent of the 1880s "beefsteak craze," in which predominantly male customers sat on boxes in rustic restaurants, drank beer, and ate steak with their bare hands.
By the Jail Café entrance, posters of people dressed as inmates peeked out at the street through barred windows. Above them, a “warden” watched from his guard tower.
Bizarrely, a sign advertised in large font that the restaurant encouraged dancing, and a separate poster for the Jail Café’s two restaurant locations—the one on Sunset Boulevard and another that was later opened on 6th Street—promised that customers would “Laugh, eat, sing, play golf, music.” (A sticker at the bottom boasted its “large banquet cells.”) Apparently, even a place called the Jail Café had to spruce up the image of prison life.
Unlike the Pirate’s Den, the Jail Café did not stage crimes against its customers. But those who dined there in 1926, when an actual robbery occurred, probably would have liked to have known this in advance. According to a Variety article at the time: “When two bandits walked in and ordered everybody to throw their hands up, folks though it was part of the evening's entertainment. However, they changed their minds when one of the bandits started going through their clothes and taking anything that looked valuable.”
Of Los Angeles’ numerous restaurant themes, prison was one of the most popular—and one of the most misrepresented. The Jail Café was part of a larger trend in which mostly white customers glorified a system that, in the U.S., disproportionately targeted and incarcerated black men.
The voyeurism likely began with the Café du Bagne in Paris, which opened in 1885 and had its waiters walk around with balls and chains attached to their ankles. At the turn of the century, similar restaurants popped up throughout the United States; a few years prior to the Jail Café, a prison-themed coffee shop, in which patrons scratched their names on the walls, celebrated its grand opening.
In 1930, the Jail Café earned a place on the newspaper Talking Screen’s “Seven Wonders of Hollywood” list. Mentioned alongside it was a new crop of Los Angeles theme restaurants, including the 24-hour Zep Diner—which was shaped like a Zeppelin and which sold “Hinden Burgers”—and the Pup Café, a stand in the shape of a big-eyed bulldog that looks so sad, one almost wonders whether it is grieving the food sold inside: hot dogs.
Late to work? In one 19-story apartment complex in Chongqing, a densely populated city in southwestern China, that shouldn’t be a problem—you can walk out the door and catch the train in the middle of your building. A monorail runs directly through the seventh and eighth floors.
Because the city is so packed with construction projects, in 2004, when Chongqing was building a new rail line, the transit authority was faced with a choice: either tear down the apartment complex, or find a workaround.
Their decision landed somewhere in between. In a move that brings to mind the lyrics of the children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, rather than go above, below, or around the apartments, they decided to go straight through it.
One might assume that such a move would drive down the price of housing there. But, according to Oddity Central, the reverse has been true: “The station located in the building has actually increased the price of apartments because it makes public transportation so easily accessible.”
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In 1960, miners began digging for barite at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. The site lies in Africa's northwest corner, between the Atlantic Ocean and the arid Atlas Mountains, beyond which stretches the expansive, parched Sahara Desert. A year into the project, the miners found a prehistoric skull that looked somewhat human. They turned the find over to the mine’s medical doctor, who gave it to a professor at the University of Rabat. That was how scientists first learned of the prehistoric inhabitants of Jebel Irhoud. Today, based on a new fossils and dating from the same site, a group of scientists says that those inhabitants represent the earliest Homo sapiens remains ever discovered—dating to roughly 300,000 years ago.
Before this, the oldest H. sapiens fossils were found in East Africa and date to approximately 195,000 years ago. The new discovery, reported in two papers published in Nature, does not mean that the origin point of our species should be relocated to North Africa, scientists say, but that the way in which we understand human evolution and migration should change.
“It allows us to envision a more complex picture for the emergence of our species,” Jean-Jacques Hublin, the lead author of one Nature paper, told reporters. “We would support that notion that around 300,000 years ago very early forms of Homo sapiens were already dispersed all over Africa.”
After the first hominin remains were found at Jebel Irhoud in the 1960s, archaeologists discovered another braincase, the jawbone of a younger person, fragments of another jaw, and other remains, along with stone tools and fossilized animal bones. Originally, the artifacts were all thought to be about 40,000 years old and to have come from Neanderthals—who, at the time, were considered precursors to H. sapiens, a waypoint on our evolutionary timeline. Since then there has been a revolution in thinking about hominin evolution. Scientists now believe that Neanderthals were a separate lineage that shared some of our skills and cultural innovations and even interbred with us.
Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, spent his early career focused on Neanderthals and has been studying Jebel Irhoud for years. In 1987, he published a paper on an arm bone found there and argued that the bone shows traits suggesting an archaic H. sapiens individual. Over the following years, he continued to visit the site, but it wasn’t until the Max Planck Institute hired him in 2004 that he had the resources to start new excavations there.
Even after the 1960s discoveries, the site continued to be an active quarry for many years. The area where the fossils were found had once been a cave, but the roof had long since been blasted away. It took “ a lot of effort” to clean the site, Hublin told reporters, but the team had a stroke of very good luck: Despite all the quarrying that had been done there, part of the site had been preserved with its stratigraphy—the layers crucial to archaeological dating—intact. And more fossils, including another skull, were still embedded in the rock. “Very early in the process we realized the site was much older than anyone could imagine,” Hublin said. Using fragments of burnt flint found in the same layer as the newly found hominin fossils, the team dated the remains back 300,000 years.
Around that same time, about 330,000 years ago, the climate would have been in one of the stages in which the Sahara was much greener—a grassland running with rivers and dotted with lakes. At Jebel Irhoud, alongside the hominin fossils, the archaeologists found many fossilized gazelle bones, and they imagine that ancient humans might have followed these migratory animals across the grasslands to this corner of the continent.
In the new view of human evolution, all those thousands of years ago, many species of hominins, like us but distinct, overlapped in various places at various times. When archaeologists find hominin bones, they no longer try to fit them into a linear sequence that ends in the emergence of H. sapiens. We are, it seems, just the last "man" standing, and not the perfected form of a long line of "less evolved” ancestors.
It could be that the individuals represented by the Jebel Irhoud fossils belonged to one of these other lineages, but when Hublin and his colleagues analyzed the finds, they found unmistakable features put the skulls solidly within the realm of H. sapiens. Their facial features, for example, look more or less like ours, with our short faces and weak brows. The braincases of these skulls, however, are still elongated and not in the shorter, “globular” form that characterizes modern human skulls and makes room for our giant brains.
There’s some question about whether these ancient hominins should be called H. sapiens if they don’t resemble modern humans in every way, but the authors of the paper argue that they’re close enough to be considered part of our species. We don't know how isolated this population of H. sapiens would have been from those in other parts of the continent, but it seems clear that our ancient relatives were exploring more of the world, and far earlier, than we ever imagined.
We've found a million ways to pollute the oceans, and it's not just plastic and oil. Noise is a major problem—sonar hurts whales, for example. According to a new report published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the sound of motorboats is enough to turn some fish into delinquent parents who leave their offspring vulnerable to predators.
Male spiny chromis damselfish spend more time than females watching over their young. Researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia studied 38 spiny chromis nests in the Great Barrier Reef and tracked the behavior of the fish dads. They used speakers to play sounds of motorboats at half the nests, while the other nests only experienced the ambient ocean sounds.
The boat noise was not beneficial to the baby fish. In fact, six out of the 19 nests subjected to boat recordings were completely empty at the end of the experiment. "It is likely the parents were either stressed or distracted by the noise, giving an advantage to the predators," said Sophie Nedelec, a biologist at the University of Exeter and the lead author of the report, in a press release. Fish fathers exposed to the noise spent more time chasing away other fish, even ones that weren't a threat, which left their nests wide open to predators.
Considering the thousands of motorboats that cruise the oceans, especially in delicate areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, noise pollution may be an even bigger problem than anyone has realized. Scientists, however, are optimistic the impact can be minimized over time through quiet zones or changing engine and propeller design. Hopefully turning the volume down will lead to less-stressed reef parents.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Despite our interest in sports as a society, for whatever reason, we can’t seem to handle more than a handful of specific professional team sports at any one time.
Sometimes, though, sports have moments that suggest they’re ready for a bigger breakthrough, even if the cards don’t ultimately fall into place. Take volleyball, which, during the 1984 Olympics was in the midst of such a moment, drawing massive ratings and public interest in the U.S.
Around the same time, ESPN, launched in 1979, was still in its infancy and looking to fill some airtime, and volleyball had the potential to be good TV.
Enter, in 1987, Major League Volleyball, which broke barriers as one of the earliest women’s professional leagues with televised games. The games were sometimes tape-delayed, sure, but you could still watch spikes and volleys on your TV.
The league came with many of the trappings of larger sports leagues, but as Sports Illustrated noted back then, it was not a top-tier league: Pay was limited and the league treated players already on the U.S. Olympic team as off-limits.
“The MLV offers a vehicle for women who are not good enough to compete in the top leagues in Japan and Italy and a chance to demonstrate to the paying public that volleyball is more than fun at the beach,” a 1987 Los Angeles Times article explained.
(Despite this, the league deferred pay and offered per diems to players, on the off chance one of the pro league’s players got a shot at the Olympics. If the players wanted to stay amateur, they could.)
And everything was on a shoestring. Steve Arnold, the league’s commissioner, told Sports Illustrated, “Our total budget is less than Don Mattingly's annual salary.”
It was a league riddled with disappointments, big and small: The league tried and failed to find big sponsors, turnover among players was high, and attendance numbers were often mixed, with teams in smaller markets drawing far larger numbers than markets with other major sports teams. The Los Angeles Starlites, despite dismal attendance numbers, were champions in both of the league’s completed seasons.
And that imbalance ultimately did the league in. In March of 1989—in the middle of MLV’s third season—the league’s struggling cashflow forced a shutdown.
"For a combination of reasons, whether it be the lack of local ownership, the marketplace, or the way the teams were promoted, the franchises in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles failed financially," Gary Schwing, the owner of the San Jose Golddiggers, told the Los Angeles Times. “The owners of the three successful franchises were unable to bail out the other three (teams), and the league was forced to suspend operations."
The people behind MLV, it turned out, were pretty familiar with failure, since many of them launched or had been associated with doomed sports leagues as varied as the World Football League and the World Hockey Association.
Consider Lee Meade, who was at one point MLV’s executive director, but had previously been associated with the ABA, the WHA, and the International Basketball Association, all of which were themselves failures.
"In the realm of failed franchises, Lee Meade has seen it all," Sports Illustrated wrote in 1990, even if everyone seemed to have a sense of humor about it.
"A lot of the negative stuff you hear about Lee is that he was involved in everything that failed," Arnold told SI. "That isn't true. People have made a lot of money on things Lee has been involved in. Unfortunately, Lee hasn't been among them."
Meade's last job in sports was working for the Las Vegas Posse, which, Wikipedia notes, "was one of the least successful CFL teams, both on the field and off."
Still, as Drake Misek points out on Medium, the legacy of MLV can be seen in modern-day leagues like Major League Soccer, which emulated MLV's single-entity ownership structure while finding a way to balance the needs of players with both amateur and professional interests.
MLV also stands out for just how unlikely its existence was at all.
“For all its problems," Misek wrote, "we simply cannot downplay MLV’s enormous accomplishment: they offered pro women’s volleyball in the U.S. on ESPN for two full seasons."
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Some of Britain’s last Benedictine monks, based in Devon, brew a tonic wine that many say tastes of a mixture of cough medicine and fruit bubblegum. Somehow, it’s become the drink of choice for violent Scottish offenders some 450 miles away.
At £7 ($9) a bottle, Buckfast tonic wine isn’t the cheapest alcoholic drink you can buy in Scotland. And at 15 percent alcohol, it isn’t the strongest, either. For the vast majority of people, it would be a stretch to call it the tastiest. (Satisfied customers who’ve bought it on Amazon would beg to differ, saying it tastes like “tears of angels” or the “elixir of life.” One adds: “They say it has no medicinal properties. But I am pretty sure they are lying.”)
What it might be, though, is the most incendiary. Though Buckfast accounts for barely half a percent of Scotland’s total alcohol sales, in 2015 the Scottish Prison Service found that over 40 percent of inmates had drunk some quantity of the stuff before their last offense. Of these, many were violent. (Some enterprising inmates had drained the glass bottle dry and then found it a handy solution for a weapon.) “The Buckie made me do it” is apparently the classic defense.
Where Buckfast really packs a punch is in how much caffeine it has: a single 750ml bottle has 281 milligrams, or around as much as 10 cans of Coke. It might well be illegal in the U.S., where the Food and Drug Administration has banned drinks that combine alcohol and caffeine. In 2014, late lamented American party drink Four Loko was forced to change its recipe and strip out the stimulants that earned it its “blackout in a can” reputation.
You’re probably not supposed to drink a whole bottle of Buckfast, which would get you as drunk as eight double shots, but people certainly do. The consequences can be messy.
The recipe itself is top secret, allegedly known only to one of the Buckfast Abbey monks. Essentially, it’s a fortified wine flavored with vanillin and packed full of preservatives and caffeine. Most of all, it’s powerfully sweet—no spoonful of sugar required to make this medicine go down.
The monks say Buckfast has all kinds of fans, including “little old ladies” pouring out a medicinal dram after dinner. But they probably aren’t the Scottish drinkers going on Buckie-fueled rampages. Instead, the Scottish press points at “neds,” local hooligans from poorer housing developments in cities like Glasgow and Dundee. “Ned,” as a term, is sometimes controversial—politicians have said that it’s classist and degrading and encouraged people not to use it.
While it almost certainly doesn’t stand for “Non-Educated Delinquent” as popular folklore suggests, the connotations are clear. (In 2003, then-politician Duncan McNeil suggested alternative terms could be “the guys that hang about the streets” or “tracksuit ambassadors.”)
The monks, for their part, aren’t delighted about the link. In the past, they’ve chalked up the controversy to anti-religious sentiment and refused to comment when Buckfast has made lurid headlines. If it were banned in Scotland, they say, those committing crimes would simply change their drink of choice, and it just isn’t fair to blame problems of massive deprivation on some monks at the other end of the country. Since the 1990s, they’ve been asked to change the recipe by reducing either the alcohol or caffeine content: they continue to refuse.
Whether intentionally or not, Buckfast’s booming popularity in Scotland doesn’t exactly hurt them—last year, they made nearly £9 million ($11.6 million) from sales of the drink. And as they’re a religious order, they don’t pay taxes on those millions.
Buckfast Abbey, where the monks live and the drink is brewed, is hours and hours away from Glasgow. No one’s exactly sure how the wine became so popular with the local louts of the cities at the opposite end of the country. The monks have suggested that it might have something to do with the traditionally Catholic fans of Scottish football club Celtic FC developing a taste for their holy drink as a pre-match aperitif in the 1970s.
But there’s evidence to suggest that Scots have had a taste for Buckfast, variously known as Wreck the Hoose Juice, Commotion Lotion, Bottle of Fight the World, Liquid Speed or Scranjuice, for much longer than that. In adverts for wine shops in 1930s Scottish newspapers, it’s the only drink they bother to mention by name.
It’s possible that Scots developed a taste for Buckfast because of its supposedly medicinal properties. In 1921, changes in licensing laws meant that alcohol could only be bought between 11:30am to 3pm and 5:30pm to 10pm on weekdays—and not at all on Sundays. But Buckfast, which was sold at pharmacies as medicine as well as in wine shops, could be bought any time. As late as the 1960s, it was marketed as “a splendid pick-me-up that restores zest and sparkle,” available at all good chemists.
Whatever the explanation, Buckfast seems firmly established in the Scottish culinary canon, along with stand-outs like super-sweet fudge lookalike “tablet,” deep-fried Mars bars, and the Munchy Box. Butchers flavor meat with it, shops use it to sell Easter eggs, and the issues of violence and crime it’s associated with continue to mushroom.
Meanwhile, down south, London hipsters may be beginning to develop a taste for the drink. At taqueria and bar Bad Sports, in trendy Hoxton, bartender and Glaswegian Stu Bale mixes it with gin and Campari to make their signature Coatbridge Negroni. “Buckfast has nice tannins and it’s fruity, so it makes a valid substitute for red vermouth,” he told Vice. It might get you hammered, he says, but “if you know what you’re doing, you can make something taste really delicious.”
Flying in an airplane is one of the safest ways to travel, especially in terms of avoiding alligator attacks. But because Florida, an alligator was killed recently after it jumped up and hit the wing of a moving aircraft.
According to WFTV, the wildlife strike occurred last week at Florida’s Orlando Executive Airport. The unnamed pilot was crossing the runway in a small jet when the animal leaped into the air and hit the wing. A fellow pilot named Brad Pierce shared a picture of the aftermath on Facebook.
The airport is bordered by two separate lakes, so the alligator’s presence on the runway is not entirely surprising.
And, of course, it is Florida. According to WKMG, there have been at least four plane-alligator collisions in the state since 1998.
When Gaspare Galati took over management of the Fondo Riella in 1872, he knew he was in for a headache. The ten-acre lemon and tangerine farm just outside of Palermo should have been a prime piece of property, bringing its owner a slice of the booming citrus market that had northwest Sicily overflowing with wealth. Instead, it seemed cursed. Galati's late brother-in-law, who had left him charge of the farm, had died of a heart attack after receiving a series of mysterious, threatening letters. And everyone knew that the farm's warden, Benedetto Carollo, had been stealing more than his share of the profits for years.
Galati was a surgeon and a family man, well-respected by everyone in town, so he went by the book. First, he tried to lease the property—but Carollo made it impossible, harassing potential tenants and tanking the farm's reputation by stealing pre-sold lemons off the trees. Eventually, Galati figured he'd nip the problem in the bud: he fired Carollo.
He must have thought that would be the end of it. Instead, in July of 1874, his new warden—Carollo's replacement—was found lying between two rows of lemon trees, with multiple bullets in his back. After Galati hired yet another warden, more threatening letters began pouring in, accusing him of firing a "man of honor" in favor of an "abject spy." If Galati didn't re-hire Carollo, one missive said, he, too, would suffer the fate of his late warden—but "more barbarous." In other words, someone was making him an offer he couldn't refuse.
The local police were suspiciously resistant to arresting Carollo, and the local judges were loathe to convict him. Galati spent the next year figuring out how deep this thing went. Eventually, having seen too much, he was forced to flee to Naples with his family. He'd accidentally gotten himself entangled with a nascent crime ring that would soon be known far and wide: the Sicilian Mafia. And all it took was inheriting a lemon grove.
For decades, from mid-19th century through the mid-20th, if you were growing citrus in northwest Sicily—lemons especially—you were almost certainly dealing with the Mafia. As Helena Attlee writes in her history of Italian citrus, The Land Where Lemons Grow, "the speculation, extortion, intimidation, and protection rackets that characterize Mafia activity were first practiced and perfected in the mid-19th century among the citrus gardens of [Palermo]." In fact, the association was so strong that some historians and political economists now think the group actually arose directly from the citrus trade: life gave them lemons, and they made organized crime.
Citrus fruits have grown in Sicily since the 11th century, when Arabic conquerers brought bitter orange trees to the island from North Africa. The trees flourished, and more and more citrus species were shipped over. By the 15th century, the prevalence of the sun-soaked trees brought the bay around Palermo a new nickname. People began calling it the "Conca D'Oro," or the "Shell of Gold."
At first, lemons were essentially a luxury good—aristocratic landowners would grow them on their property, and either sell them whole as decorations or distill their peels into fragrant essences. Then, near the end of the 18th century, the British navy finally came around to the idea, presented to them decades before by the surgeon James Lind, that regular doses of lemon juice could fend off scurvy. The once-fancy fruits became a sudden necessity, and Britain began importing hundreds of thousands of gallons of juice from Sicily every year.
By the early 1800s, in the words of one historian, the island was essentially "a vast lemon juice factory." The next few decades kickstarted a worldwide love for Palermo citrus, and ships began setting out daily during harvesting season, many of them headed to produce markets in Europe and the United States.
Around the same time, political turmoil led to a reorganization of land ownership in Palermo. As one group of researchers explains in a recent paper in the Journal of Economic History, early 19th century Italian lemon farming happened largely under a feudal system, in which peasants did the farming and the absentee landowners took most of the profits. A class of middlemen, called the gabellotti, managed these relationships, hiring workers and overseeing day-to-day work on the farm. Starting around 1812, popular revolts turned much of the land over to the gabellotti, who, fearing thieves and marauders, began hiring private guards to protect the assets that were now theirs.
Then, after 1860, when Sicily officially became part of Italy, parcels of what had been church- and state-owned land went up for sale. This led to a proliferation of small farms, and many of these new landowners also decided to grow lemons, by far the most profitable crop. They, too, found themselves in the position of having to hire guards—and those who couldn't afford to do so found themselves targeted not only by thieves, but by the gabellotti and their guards, who saw a unique opportunity for extortion.
"The coalition between gabellotti, [guards], and [thieves] triggered a system of corruption and intimidation such that landowners who could not afford to hire a guard became the target of brigands," the economists write. "This adverse institutional environment provided the breeding ground for the organization which would become known as the mafia."
In the paper, they present some empirical proof for this claim—after studying a large-scale crime survey from 1886 and a map of mob activity from 1900, they found that the probability of Mafia presence in a given area of Sicily relates strongly to that area's level of citrus production. Although other researchers have linked the birth of organized crime to different local resource booms, including the rise of sulfur mines, "we believe our paper complements [this research], and is able to explain some aspects that previous theories were not able to explain," writes one of the authors, Alessia Isopi, in an email.
What made the lemon farmers such ripe targets? According to Attlee, much of the blame can be placed on the fruits themselves. "Among species of citrus in Italy, lemons are some of the most difficult and demanding to cultivate," she says. They need well-fertilized soil, a steady supply of water, and protection from wind and extreme temperatures, all of which come only at great infrastructural cost. Most trees need to be coddled for seven or eight years before they produce enough lemons to sell. When they do bear fruit, it's easy enough for people to steal it, especially when compared with smaller crops like wheat or olives.
The magnitude of such an investment, combined with the many possibilities for failure, made farmers "very vulnerable," Attlee says. "They were just ready to be exploited by the first mafiosi."
Over the decades, this exploitation became more and more sophisticated. It generally occurred in a kind of push-and-pull format that will be familiar to viewers of contemporary crime shows. If another farmer couldn't afford to pump in water, a mafioso would gladly help him—and then make the farmer sign a contract that allowed him to charge massive amounts for that water, which he would do as soon as rainfall was low. As Galati's experiences illustrate, they formed relationships with those who might have checked their power, especially policemen and judges.
The Mafia also controlled the trade itself, often buying a farm's fruits to resell before they were even off the trees, and creating artificial shortages by picking green lemons and storing them until the prices improved. As Attlee writes, they had a sinister signal to show off their relationship with a particular grove: they'd nail a single lemon to one of the garden's doors, and hang a shotgun cartridge next to it.
In more recent decades, Sicily's citrus monopoly has loosened. New trade laws and shifting import taxes have made the once-golden crop much less profitable. The groves' narrow rows and terraces—the very aspects that allowed the mafiosi to sneakily gun down, say, wardens they didn't like—leave no room for large machinery, and have prevented farmers from achieving the industrial-scale production that is now common in places such as Brazil. By now, "there's really not enough money involved in citrus to interest the Mafia," says Attlee. They've moved on to juicier rackets.
But next time you squeeze a lemon into your tea, take a moment to pay it some respect—it's a fruit with a bloody history.
Nick Gemayel of Rochester, New York, was sitting in his office on Monday, June 5, while a storm moved passed overhead. Then, one witness told WHEC, there was "a big bold, flash, boom."
It was lightning, which hit the sidewalk outside of Rochester AutoWerks—but didn't stay outside.
“I saw from the light switch, a very, extremely, bright flash of light,” Gemayel told WHEC,“and the loudest noise, like, ‘crack’ or ‘pop’ I've ever heard in my life. Then I was in a black room all of a sudden because all the power went out."
For about 30 minutes, Gemayel wasn't sure what had happened, exactly. Then his hand started to blister and his head started feeling "foggy." Doctors later told him that he had rhabdomyolysis, a breakdown of muscles following an indirect injury, such as a powerful electric shock. The contents of the destroyed muscle fibers enter the bloodstream, where they can go on to severely injure the kidneys.
In Gemayel's case, doctors said he would fully recover in body—if not in mind. “Don't know if I'll be touching any light switches or anything anytime soon," he told WHEC. "I'm a little terrified of that office from now on but I'll get over that."
All of this is a good reminder that nature doesn't always care whether we're inside or outside.
In 1985, the wing of a hotel in central Mexico City, just blocks from the central Zocolo plaza, was damaged during an earthquake. Under the floor, there was a surprise—ruins that dated back to the 15th century.
Now, after seven years of excavations, archaeological investigators are revealing what they found: a semi-circular temple dedicated to the Aztec god of the wind, Ehcatl-Quetzalcoatl, and a ritual ball court where the European colonial explorer Hernan Cortes may have watched Aztecs play ball, Reuters reports.
In addition, the archaeologists discovered 32 sets of human neck bones that they believe belonged to victims of human sacrifice.
While these excavations have been going on, the hotel has had to delay reopening its wing. Now, the temple and the stairs of the ball court will be open the public, below the hotel. “Some of their guests still likely will have to sleep above an Aztec burial ground,” the Associated Press notes. For some people, that could be an attraction, rather than a bug!
If you have a good tram driver, you probably won't even notice. So it's nice that once a year, the best of the best get a chance to shine.
The annual "European Tram-Driver Championship," aka TRAM-EM, aims, in its own words, to "project the public transport service as a modern and interesting service." They do this in the most obvious way possible: by requiring tram drivers to perform feats of agility, speed, cunning and strength, via driving their trams.
This year's TRAM-EM—the sixth one ever—was held in Tenerife, Spain last weekend, and featured 23 teams from 14 countries. Events included acceleration competitions, precision stopping, and "Tram Bowling," in which a driver uses his or her vehicle to knock a massive inflatable ball towards an arrangement of 6-foot-tall pins.
This year's individual winners were Franka Sonntag of Berlin and Karim Annough of Paris. The winning team was from Paris, with Berlin and Frankfurt coming second and third.
If you are so inclined, you can watch an 8-hour recording of the competition on the TRAM-EM Youtube channel. And if you just want the bowling, here's some from 2016:
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.
