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These Tiny Teeth Suggest Neanderthals Evolved Earlier Than We Thought

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They came from Spain’s eerie “Pit of Bones.”

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Deep within the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain, a cave called the “Pit of Bones” became the final resting place for some very tiny ancient teeth. The teeth aren’t just tiny—they’re unusually small, almost shrunken in comparison with the Neanderthal skulls they came from. According to Aida Gómez-Robles, who works at University College London as an anthropologist, this strange size discrepancy could suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans split off far earlier than previously thought. She published her findings on May 15, 2019, in Science Advances.

To be fair, scientists have never been able to agree precisely when we diverged from Neanderthals. Previous DNA estimates suggest the two groups split around 400,000 years ago, according to the study. But these tiny teeth don’t fit squarely into that timeline. Though they date back 430,000 years, they look eerily similar to the teeth of Neanderthals that lived much later, with features distinct from those of Homo sapiens.

According to Gómez-Robles’s past research, hominid teeth evolve at a relatively standard rate and tend to become smaller over time. The teeth of the last known common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans were larger and more primitive, according to the study. So in order for Neanderthals to develop teeth as small and distinctively shaped as those found in the Pit of Bones, they would have needed to split from Homo sapiens much earlier than previously thought. As Gómez-Robles told Science, “there wasn’t enough time for Neanderthal teeth to change at the rate [teeth] do in other parts of the human family tree”

To test this theory, Gómez-Robles calculated the rate at which the teeth found in the Pit of Bones would have needed to evolve after Neanderthals split from their common ancestor with Homo sapiens, according to Science. According to these models, Neanderthals would have needed to split from Homo sapiens somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago.

Not everyone’s convinced. The paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, who directs the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, believes researchers shouldn’t jump to conclusions that all dental rates of evolution would be this standard, according to a story in Smithsonian Magazine. Gómez-Robles says it is possible that the teeth simply evolved at an unusually rapid rate due to the genetic bottleneck effect seen in remote, isolated populations. But she believes this rapid evolution would have resulted in other physical changes beyond the teeth, as she told Smithsonian.

The “Pit of Bones,” or Sima de los Huesos, has been an enormously significant treasure trove for scientists studying the remains of early humans. It’s also a chillingly accurate name. The depression extends more than 46 feet below the surface, topped with layers upon layers of bones from cave bears. But under the bear bones, the pit holds one of the largest collection of human fossils found anywhere in the world, National Geographic reports. Archaeologists have unearthed over 6,500 human bones from the cave, including several nearly intact human skulls—a real needle in the haystack as far as 300,000-year-old human remains go. One of Sima de los Huesos’s most remarkable skulls opened up a 430,000-year-old murder mystery, bearing two fractures on its forehead that came from “multiple blows” from someone with “an intention to kill,” the BBC reports.

If Gómez-Robles is right, she may have filled in a crucial blank in the timeline of humanity’s family tree. Her research would rule out any possible shared ancestral species between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals that evolved 800,000 years ago. If she’s wrong, at least she’s now intimately familiar with some very old, very tiny teeth.


A Remote Australian Archipelago Is Home to Roughly 600 People and 414 Million Pieces of Trash

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The Cocos (Keeling) Island chain is beautiful, but littered with plastic debris.

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Charles Darwin was utterly charmed by the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. When the naturalist visited the remote archipelago of 27 small coral islands in the eastern Indian Ocean, in April 1836, he jotted down rave reviews in his journal. There, he gushed about the sight of the “finest white sand” and the pleasure of sitting in the shade beneath the “tall waving trunks” of the “Cocoa nut” trees. He was awed by the lagoons, and the “fields of delicately branched Corals” below their surface. “Throughout the whole group of Islands, every single atom, even from the most minute particle to large fragments of rocks, bear the stamp of once having been subjected to the power of organic arrangement,” Darwin wrote. “Such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world.”

The islands, which are Australian external territories and roughly 1,300 miles from the country’s northwest coast, are still lorded over by palm trees, still striped with sandy beaches, still dreamy little freckles of land in a turquoise sea. But a new paper published in Scientific Reports suggests that they’re also lousy with trash.

Back in 2017, Jennifer Lavers, a marine ecotoxicologist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, set out to sample the trash that collected on their shores. Lavers often researches plastic pollution; she previously dug into the plastic debris piled up on Henderson Island, a relatively pristine coral atoll and UNESCO site in the South Pacific. For this new work, Lavers visited seven of the chain’s 27 islands. The selected sites comprise 88 percent of the archipelago’s overall landmass, and included both inhabited and uninhabited islands. (Only two of are peopled—as of 2014, their total population was around 600—and one is a national park and mating ground for seabirds.)

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Lavers sampled lagoon and ocean-facing beaches across the sample sites, and looked at various types of sediments, including sand and pebbles. Some trash was glaringly obvious—waterlogged flip-flops, plastic bottles, and tangles of rope are hard to miss. To capture less-conspicuous debris, Lavers exhumed debris from a depth of 10 centimeters (roughly four inches).

It wasn’t feasible to sample every nook and cranny of the archipelago. Some portions “are difficult to access due to the very shallow lagoon—even with a kayak it can be challenging, especially in the extreme heat,” Lavers writes in an email. But in the places where she did look, Lavers found a whole lot of garbage.

On top of the sand and hidden just beneath it, Lavers recorded 23,227 pieces of trash. About a quarter of the items were single-use plastics—particularly products such as straws, toothbrushes, and flimsy bags—and another 60 percent or so were microplastics, smaller shards that splinter off bigger pieces and are pretty much everywhere. “We definitely see microplastics washing up in the waves, as well as larger items like buoys and polystyrene trays,” Lavers writes. The density of the debris varied from spot to spot, depending on whether a particular site was exposed to or insulated from currents that bandied the trash to shore. Overall, there was considerably more debris buried beneath the sand than sitting on top of it.

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By marrying the mean density data Lavers gathered on the ground with aerial imagery of the islands, Lavers and her collaborators estimated the total trash that might be present along the entire archipelago. They put the figure at 414 million pieces—a big, filthy human fingerprint smudged across a landscape where there are very few people to begin with.

The same unblemished shoreline that enchanted Darwin is part of what drew Lavers to the archipelago, too. Without the compounding variables of, say, locally generated trash or well-intentioned cleanups, the trash on the beach is a good proxy for what’s out there bobbing around in the ocean. In their paper, the authors characterized their data about debris density and number as “conservative,” and note that they “should be interpreted as minimum estimates.” That's partly because of the limitations of surveying a wide expanse, and partly because it’s hard to overstate plastic’s range: Shards have turned up in oceans, rivers, and other landscapes all around the world—as deep as the Mariana Trench, and as high as the slopes of the French Pyrenees. Regarding Lavers’s study, University of Toronto ecologist Chelsea Rochman, who studies microplastics, told NPR that “It's just kind of sad to kind of read about it and think, 'Yep, okay, this is becoming, I guess, normal.’”

The full picture of plastic’s impact on ecosystems is still coming into view, and single-use plastics continue to proliferate. That means researchers cataloguing trash in beautiful, far-flung places will have a mess on their hands for years to come.

How to Explore a Shipwreck From the Comfort of Your Couch

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Without the training, equipment, and utter terror.

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For many people, the idea of strapping on diving gear, dropping off the side of a boat, and descending to explore the secrets of the ocean first-hand is more fantasy than reality. Well, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has brought that fantasy closer to home—right into your home, in fact.

The BOEM (which manages submerged resources on the country’s continental shelves) recently launched its own Virtual Archaeology Museum, an online resource that takes visitors under the waves to explore five sunken vessels—one just off the North Carolina coast, and others in the Gulf of Mexico. The museum contains videos, virtual three-dimensional models, and mosaic maps that allow users to traverse wrecks from the 19th and 20th centuries. The wrecks were originally discovered during gas and oil exploration, and through the use of remotely operated vehicles (they are too deep for divers to visit), BOEM scientists were able to survey the ships in minute detail to create the digital models.

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Users can explore the decks and hulls, but also get a look at the cargo they were carrying. Littered across the floor of the Gulf are ceramics, demijohn wine jugs, animal hides, muskets, cannons, and more. The BOEM believes that the museum serves several purposes—giving armchair wreck divers a close view, helping teachers, and acting as a resource for scientists studying wrecks or the evolution of underwater habitats. “The Virtual Archaeology Museum will serve as a valuable teaching asset in both school and university classrooms,” said BOEM Gulf of Mexico Region DirectorMike Celata, via press release, “and the data collected will be a focal point for underwater researchers, its online presence allowing collaboration worldwide.”

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For all the detail now at everyone’s fingertips, there is still very little known about the ships themselves. The Blake Ridge wreck off the Carolina coast is believed to have been a small merchant vessel traveling the Gulf Stream, a common trade route. Three of the ships—known as the Monterrey wrecks—are more mysterious. It’s believed that all three went under at the same time because of how close together they ended up on the seafloor. The ship known as Monterrey A was equipped with a cannon mounted on a pivot carriage, suggesting it was a heavily armed privateer vessel. B and C, on the other hand, have the design of merchant vessels. Perhaps they were being escorted by the site A ship, or were captured by pirates aboard that ship before they all fell victim to a storm.

A 'Century Plant' in Chicago Is Having an Epic Growth Spurt

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It's outgrown the greenhouse, and it's a big greenhouse.

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Agave americana, or the century plant, is native to Mexico and the deserts of the Southwest United States. Known for its broad, waxy leaves and ornamental spikes, the plant’s nickname comes from the fact that it takes a really long time to come into bloom—though not really 100 years. They bloom just once, at the end of their long lives. Now, one century plant in Chicago is showing that A. americana is worth waiting for. Currently, the plant has reached a towering 32 feet tall—too big for its greenhouse home—and is showing little sign of slowing down.

Back in 2016, this particular century plant began showing signs of growth, which wasn’t that surprising. The plant had been in the care of the Garfield Park Conservatory’s Desert House for more than five decades, but it was slow-going (growing) until winter hit this January and the century plant’s quiote (the central stalk that spreads seeds to reproduce) grew three feet in a month, from seven to 10 feet, including an impressive 11 inches in one weekend, followed by an astounding 7 inches in one day. “It’s not surprising," says the unflappable Mary Eysenbach, Director of Conservatories at Chicago Parks District. "Just a little more unpredictable.”

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This unpredictability refers to the fact that the tremendous growth spurt happened outside of its traditional season—and in captivity. Normally, century plants in their native desert environs flower during summer through late fall. “In [its natural] habitat it can often grow six inches a day,” conservatory floriculturist Ray Jorgensen told local television station WTTW. “What is unusual is that it’s doing it in the middle of winter.” Even though the xeric habitat of the Desert House—which is home to cacti, agaves, and euphorbia—mimics the century plant’s native conditions, the plant has been on Chicago’s seasonal schedule long enough that it is unusual that its growth period is not synced up to the climate outside—and the city just had a particularly brutal winter. Now we’re on the doorstep of summer and the plant continues its upward climb at the same pace.

Horticulturists at the conservatory suspect that watering has a lot to do with the rapid growth. “There are many factors that drive the plant’s reproductive cycle,” says Eysenbach. “However, we did start providing it with more water in January.” While some century plants’ inflorescences have been known to reach heights of 25 feet, the speed with which the conservatory’s grey-green plant has shot up is rare.

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The Desert House’s ceiling is made of glass panes, and is only 25 feet high. Conservatory staff has already removed the glass panel just above the plant, and “the quiote has the support of the edges of the window frame if it needed it,” Eysenbach says. Warmer temperatures should fuel even more growth, so it appears the sky’s the limit (though brown lower leaves suggest that the end is in sight).

The century plant, for all its height, is not mature just yet. When it finally goes into bloom and produces seeds, that will be it: Death will follow.But there’s still something to see. According to Eysenbach, “there is another [agave] blooming now as well.”

Australia's Growing Camel Meat Trade Reveals a Hidden History of Early Muslim Migrants

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Afghan cameleers helped settle Australia's interior.

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There is a camel in Hanifa Deen’s kitchen. He looks down at her as she cooks, eyes proud yet warm, delicately flared snout smelling dinner. While the creature is merely an image on a poster, Deen, who has written several books on Islam in Australia, regards him affectionately.

“It looks like such a regal creature, such a haughty creature,” she says. That’s why you’ll only find camels decorating the walls of Deen’s kitchen, rather than filling a pot on her stove. “I admit, I can’t bring myself to eat a camel burger,” she says.

For many, a disinterest in eating camel may sound natural. But around the world, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporas, camel meat is dinner. In Morocco, it’s stewed into fragrant tagines. In Cairo, diners will pay a premium for the animal’s delicate fat. In Somali neighborhoods of the American Midwest, camel burgers offer immigrant communities, and curious neighbors, a fusion-inspired taste of home.

In contrast, most Australians, who are predominantly European in origin, come from cuisines unused to camel meat. Yet for a large lobby of Australian environmentalists, animal rights activists, and entrepreneurs—not to mention foodies—getting more camel into the Australian diet is not only a gustatory goal: It’s a solution to a major environmental problem.

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That’s because Australia is home to the largest feral camel population in the world, an estimated 300,000 to one million animals. The camels aren’t native to Australia: They were imported in the 19th century to explore the vast deserts of the country’s interior. Left to roam after the advent of motorcars, the population now poses a threat to both delicate ecosystems and local water supplies. In an attempt to address this environmental damage, the Australian government has sponsored aerial camel culls, in which feral camels are shot down by helicopter, their flesh left to rot in the sand. This outrages animal rights activists, and many have suggested another way. Why not use the feral camels for meat? In Australian neighborhoods home to recent Middle Eastern and African immigrants, after all, halal butcher shops already carry camel meat taken from the Outback, and the Australian camel-meat export industry is growing modestly.

The camel meat industry doesn't just aspire to address the country’s feral camel conundrum. It also reveals the lingering legacy of a little-known aspect of Australian colonization. Recent Muslim immigrants to Australia present one potential market for the country's fledgling camel-meat trade. Yet it was Australia's first Muslim migrants who helped bring camels to Australia in the first place—and in doing so, enabled the settlement of the Australian interior.

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In the 19th century, British colonists in Australia faced an endless desert. While Australia’s aboriginal people had thrived in the interior’s arid landscape for millennia, Europeans were stumped by the vast expanse. Was it flat or mountainous? Dry or a giant inland sea? Early expeditions failed to make much progress. European modes of exploration, including by horse, weren’t suited to the terrain.

Inspiration came from elsewhere in the Empire. The British had come into contact with camels in their colonial holdings in India, where camels and their drivers had travelled Northwest India’s Thar desert for centuries. In 1858, The Victorian Exploration Committee tasked horse dealer George Landell with recruiting camels and their drivers from India. When explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set off on their famous 1860 trek across the Australian continent, they brought camels with them. Hardy, steady, and dependable, able to trek for miles under the brutal sun with very little water, camels became an invaluable part of the overland network of goods, labor, and infrastructure that enabled the settlement of Australia’s interior. In the latter half of the 19th century, Australians would import an estimated 20,000 camels to the continent.

Camel handlers came with them. Called “Afghan cameleers,” an estimated 3,000 of these mostly Muslim men migrated to Australia. They weren’t all from Afghanistan—many came from British North India—but white Australians dubbed them all “Afghan,” and the name stuck, says Philip Jones, Senior Curator of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum. Despite the careless nomenclature, the cameleers’ significance was acknowledged by some white Australian officials. “It is no exaggeration to say that if it had not been for the Afghan and his Camels,” wrote one white Australian official in 1902, then “Wilcannia, White Cliffs, Tibooburra, Milperinka, and other Towns, each centres of considerable population, would have practically ceased to exist.”

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Yet the settling of Australia’s interior was, like the rest of the British colonial project, underlied by a toxic cocktail of racial pseudoscience. The Muslim cameleers, especially those who came from what is now Afghanistan, were regarded as “the aboriginal natives of Asia,” says Nahid Afrose Kabir, a historian and sociologist who has written a book on the history of Australian Muslims. While the cameleers may have escaped the more extreme violence visited by Europeans on Australian Aboriginal communities, white Australians’ belief in the Muslims’ racial inferiority, coupled with competition over scarce Outback drinking water, boiled over into occasional racial violence.

“The Afghans and their camels are the filthiest lot that ever went near water,” wrote one Australian official in 1893. Tensions exploded in 1894, when a white Australian, Tom Knowles, shot and killed two cameleers, Noor Mahomet and Jehan Mohamet, as they performed wudu, the ritualistic washing before namaz or Muslim prayers, in a Western Australian spring. A jury found Knowles not guilty.

The cameleers set up enduring networks of infrastructure and trade, but they themselves were mostly transitory. This was partly the nature of their profession: Even in India, cameleers were accustomed to undertaking long, rough, episodic voyages on contract. But it was also by Australian government design. By the late-19th century, calls for Australia to become a country of its own were mounting. Nationalism brought a wave of heightened racism. In 1901, the new Australian nation codified these racist sentiments into law. Collectively called the White Australia policy, these immigration laws barred immigrants pending their successful completion of Byzantine “language tests," administered in any European language immigration officers pleased. Like the “literacy tests” of the U.S. Jim Crow South, these tests were about race, not language; the arcane requirements magically loosened for European applicants. The policy halted almost all non-white immigration until the Australian government relaxed enforcement in the 1970s.

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Combined with the advent of motorized transport, the White Australia policy meant there was no place left for the Afghan cameleers. By the 1920s, the vast majority of them left the country. Their camels remained behind. Some of them were shot under the South Australian Camels Destruction Act of 1925. Others were released into the wilderness, where they continue to thrive to this day.

While the most visible, feral camels aren’t the only mark the cameleers left on Australia. Several of their mosques, like those in Perth and Adelaide, continue to host religious services. Meanwhile, descendants of the 300 or so cameleers who stayed and married white or Aboriginal women still live in parts of South Australia, recognizable by their surnames and their family pride.

Hanifa Deen's affection for camels may stem from this legacy. Growing up in one of the few Muslim families in Perth, Deen attended a mosque alongside a few of the remaining cameleers. They seemed ancient. “I’d see all these old men, bearded with their turbans, pulling on their hookahs slowly and swaying as if caught up in a dream from another world,” she says.

When she began doing research on the cameleers for a book project, Deen was struck by the vitality of the young men in archival photographs. They were vibrant, hopeful, and very, very handsome. "My main problem was who was I going to marry," she jokes. But in one photo, a strangely familiar face gave her pause: It was her grandfather. A businessman, he and his wife had migrated to Australia from British India in the late-19th century. While he eventually returned to South Asia, his son, born in Australia, settled in the continent. As a child in majority-white Australia, Deen rarely heard official histories of people like her family. The reason for this omission, she says, is obvious: “Who writes the history books?”

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Now, Deen and other Australian Muslims are remedying this historical erasure by writing the history books themselves. Thanks to these efforts, and to education initiatives from institutions such as the Australian Islamic Museum, the past couple decades have brought increasing recognition of the cameleers' role in Australian history to the mainstream. Kabir says this is especially important in the wake of recent, brutal Islamophobic attacks like the Christchurch mosque shooting, which was committed by a white Australian.

Meanwhile, the very groups Australia once excluded may just hold the key to solving—at least in part—the country's feral camel dilemma. From halal butcher shops to wholesalers exporting camels to the Middle East, Australia's camel meat trade is on the up. The industry faces challenges, primary among them the difficulty of transporting feral camels and fresh meat across the Outback. But lovers of camel meat say it's worth it for the taste alone: like a cross between lamb and beef, mostly lean but with pockets of sweet, delicate fat. Camel meat is so good, one Somali-Australian butcher told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it's only a matter of time before European Australians catch on. When they do, they can thank the Afghan cameleers.

The Livestock Living at the End of the World

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Things get hairy when you plop pigs on a subantarctic island.

In the spring of 1866, the American General Grant struck the western cliffside of Auckland Island, a remote, subantarctic mass of rocky land in the middle of the South Pacific. Trapped inside a rocky cavern, the ship began its fateful plunge into the frigid water, dragging most of its passengers down with it. Things looked bleak for the few who survived—the uninhabited island was often plagued by severe winds, heavy downpours, and harsh cold spells. But the castaways benefited from an unexpected resource that helped keep the majority of them alive for 18 months until their eventual rescue. Deep in the forest lay a herd of long-haired, narrow-faced pigs—or rather, strange, precious island pork.

Today, well over a century later, as many as 1,000 of these pigs still plod along the misty shoreline, thrusting their narrow snouts into the earth to find edible roots, flipping beach stones in search of fly larvae, and devouring the occasional whale carcass that’s been washed ashore. “They’ve adapted well,” remarks Michael Willis, director of Rare Breeds International and founder of Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. At his Christchurch nature reserve, Willis cares for a small group of Auckland Island pigs that have been scooped from the edge of the world and transplanted onto mainland New Zealand. “Their tails are hairy, their ears are hairy, and some have a bit of a down on them to stay warm.”

Scrappy, agile, and, according to Willis, “good-natured things,” they’re incredible creatures that were never supposed to exist. Centuries ago, the pigs were plopped on the South Pacific archipelago and have been there ever since. And, while they’re now considered man-made pests ripe for removal, their unique island evolution has rendered them extremely valuable and priorities for preservation.

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The origin story of the strange swine begins with deception, tragedy, and resourcefulness. The Auckland Islands, an archipelago now considered part of New Zealand, lie over 360 miles south of the main island, where fur seals, sea lions, and whales are drawn to its subantarctic shores each year. By the early-19th century, whalers and sealers had begun cashing in on the abundance. According to local lore, they mischarted the islands by 25 to 30 miles on some early, influential maps, hoping to keep the goldmine they’d discovered a secret. This would have been a devastating distortion to anyone who believed they were sailing into open sea, only to come face to face with huge, rocky cliffs protruding through the mist.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the General Grant wasn’t the first ship to meet its fate in the cluster of islands, and it wouldn’t be the last. The islands ensnared whalers, sealers, and voyagers sailing along the southern “Great Circle Route,” a common circuit for ships cutting through the South Pacific Ocean. Within the span of a century, at least nine ships met their fate in the islands.

So it was out of concern for castaways that pigs were first brought to the island. British mariner Abraham Bristow was the first European to happen upon the treacherous archipelago in 1806. In the hopes of making the prospect of future shipwrecks a bit less grim, he returned one year later with a sizable posse of grunting, squealing passengers. Upon their release onto the island, the swine survived. Then, they thrived.

Bristow’s first installment of pigs was only the beginning. For nearly a century, the Auckland Islands were subjected to a long, devastating history of livestock liberations. Pigs were plopped ashore again on the main Auckland Island in 1842, followed by a third deposit in the 1890s. By the end of the 19th century, the feral pig population on the main Auckland Island was flourishing.

But while these scrappy survivors were living out a utopian alternative to Lost, they were simultaneously decimating the rest of the island. Yes, they fed a few castaways, but they also scarfed down plant roots, albatross eggs, and penguins. They all but forced white-capped mollymawks into breeding in the island’s steep cliffs, after tossing adult birds from their nests and devouring their eggs and small chicks. According to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), they’re largely responsible for the disappearance of over 30 native bird species from the island.

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“Pigs affect most of the species present on the island, from the albatross to the megaherbs to the insects in the soil,” says Rose Hanley-Nickolls, DOC Auckland Islands project assistant. “Megaherbs should be flowering across the island, but only a few plants cling on in the most inaccessible places.”

And pigs are only part of the story. Goats were released in multiple locations, and were found to be living on the northwest side of Port Ross, one of the driest and warmest parts of Auckland Island, until the 1990s. Rabbits, too, were introduced to the archipelago when the Victoria Society of Australia deposited a colony on the northernmost island of the cluster, Enderby Island. Several decades later, a small herd of cattle was shuttled there alongside European hopefuls starting a small farming venture. But when the climate proved too harsh, the project, and all the cows with it, were abandoned. For nearly two centuries, the stranded animals lived in isolation within their new home, which, with few to no natural predators, they completely wrecked.

By the 1980s, the DOC had set out to restore the native ecosystems by ridding the Auckland Islands of its non-native pests. By 1992, all goats had been eradicated from the main Auckland island. In 1991, the DOC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars dispatching a sharp-shooting crew to kill all remaining cattle on Enderby Island. When it was time to rid the island of rabbits, they enlisted Willis’s help to round up a few of the creatures before dropping poisoned pellets over the common grazing areas. With just one other co-voyager who was a veterinarian and friend, Willis boarded the only vessel that could get him there, a navy ship, and headed south.

When you’re not marooned on the island, it’s stunning. From dramatic green cliffs to bays wriggling with whales, nature’s simultaneous hostility and abundance comes roaring to life in this rugged landscape. Unfamiliar with humans, much of the wildlife had no reason to fear Willis. “You could walk up to giant albatross, and they’d just sit there and allow you to stroke them,” he says. “Penguins would walk right past you, and sea lions would come up to your tent at nighttime.”

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That is—except for the Enderby Island rabbits. Chasing rabbits, it turns out, is a universally difficult task. The pair had to get creative, luring them with carrots and tossing nets over the unassuming animals. “We had the best luck catching them at nighttime, using a spotlight with one person holding the spotlight and the other person sneaking ‘round behind and tossing a net over them.”

Eventually, the duo caught nearly 50 rabbits, which they shuttled to mainland New Zealand. Willis has tried to keep the population alive, raising some at Willowbank, and trying to track down zoos and breeders with an interest in rare breeds. But, to his dismay, it’s been a challenge. “It sounds silly, but the rabbits have proven to be very, very difficult to breed,” he says. “There’s a small group in the U.S., but in New Zealand, there's really only just over 100 breeding females.”

Allowing a man-made rabbit of destruction to slowly disappear doesn’t necessarily sound like such a big deal. But people like Willis care so much about these breeds that they’ll spend a week on a remote island—literally dangling carrots—to catch a few dozen of them, and they do it because they’re defending another kind of conservation: livestock biodiversity.

Back in Christchurch, Willis manages the New Zealand Rare Breeds Conservation Society’s gene bank, a vast repository for frozen genetic material from a myriad of pigs, cows, sheep, and even yaks. According to the NZRBCS’s website, it serves as a kind of “genetic insurance” in case a natural disaster or pathogen wipes out an entire breed—or a smaller-scale safeguard if, for instance, a breeder’s “stud bull fall[s] over the cliff in the back paddock.”

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Even without a natural disaster, or the sudden death of a stud, livestock biodiversity is currently under threat. As agriculture increasingly prioritizes size, yield, and productivity, and animals continue to be cross-bred with commercial breeds, the number of minority breeds grows smaller and smaller. According to Willis, roughly 12 livestock breeds go extinct each month.

“Once they go, you can’t really recreate new ones that will meet the needs of the future,” he says. In the face of a rapidly changing climate, maintaining a diversity of breeds able to adapt to different weather patterns, temperatures, soil compositions, and overall environments will be critical.

For this reason, the Auckland Island animals might be especially important creatures for preservation. The breeds’ almost 200 years in relative isolation has paved the way for a peculiar kind of evolution, or at least some fearless adaptive behaviors. Auckland Island goats grew to be among the largest in New Zealand, while Auckland Island pigs are relatively small and markedly athletic. When the rabbits ate most of the grass on the island, Enderby cattle were driven to higher ground and steep cliff faces in pursuit of vegetation. According to Willis, they’ve been spotted eating seaweed. “We know they can digest it … Whether or not that's a valuable trait, we don’t know.”

The most valuable trait of some of these animals, however, isn’t one that they’ve acquired in centuries of isolation. Rather, it’s one that they lack.

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On the mainland of New Zealand, Living Cell Technologies (LCT) keeps a small herd of Auckland Island pigs in a secured, high-tech quarantine facility, where each one—according to Willis—is worth close to $450,000.

“Due to 200 years of isolation after they were left on the island, the Auckland Island pigs are free from viruses [and] pathogens which affect most other pigs,” says LCT CEO, Ken Taylor. While widespread pig-borne viruses have been a major obstacle in xenotransplantation, or grafting cells from animals for use in human therapies, the Auckland Island pigs haven’t been exposed to them.

Using cells sourced from the virus-free Auckland Island pigs, LCT is testing an experimental therapy for Parkinson’s Disease called NTCELL. Support cells, which secrete cerebrospinal fluid and support the natural function of the nervous system, are taken from a sedated pig’s choroid plexus and inserted in capsule form into a damaged site of the human brain. According to Taylor, the therapy is currently undergoing Phase IIb trials.

This is where the story of the Auckland Island pigs, in a way, comes full circle. It’s a story of human ingenuity that completely disfigures the planet—yet, somehow, as we scramble in the aftermath, we make room for innovation within the disaster we’ve created.

As of this year, most of the Auckland Islands are free of these magnificent mammalian pests, but the main island continues to bear feral pig, as well as cat, populations. Last year, Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage pledged two million dollars to complete plans for restoring the island to its predator-free status. While much of the devastation caused to vegetation will be reversible, it will likely take millions of dollars—and, according to the DOC, about ten years—to carry out the eradication.

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“The logistics of running a project of this scale in such a remote location are immense,” says says Hanley-Nickolls. “Even just getting the staff and equipment to the island is difficult!” While the pigs will be hunted, finding and eradicating cats will require the development of an entirely new methodology.

Not to mention, it’s tough terrain—even for experts. “Auckland Island is quite hostile, large, and very difficult to get around,” says Willis. “People have just disappeared there, never to be seen again.”

According to Hanley-Nickolls, it will take a few years of securing funds and setting up proper infrastructure before the hunters head south. But if all goes according to plan, within the next decade, the pigs will disappear, making room for the albatross to safely nest, and the megaherbs to once again blossom.

With any luck, and lots of financing, there might be room for another expedition with Willis to ensure the pigs don’t vanish entirely. “It’s these rare breeds that give regions their identities, like the specific grapes or goat cheese they produce,” he says. “Without saving these breeds of animals, we lose communities … we lose history.” A hairy embodiment of how humans have colonized, scarred, and tried to heal the planet—all the way to the end of the Earth—is, perhaps, a history worth holding onto.

California's Wild Flower Hotline Provides the Latest Scoop on Superblooms

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It’s been updated every Friday in spring for nearly 40 years.

If you call 818-768-1802, extension 7 in March, April or May, you can hear actor Joe Spano rhapsodize about the wildflowers blooming in California that week. “Milk maids, dozens of them, line the trail beckoning you onward,” he said of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in March. It’s a recording that Spano volunteers to do at the request of a friend and 2,226 people had called this number by late April. This is the Theodore Payne Foundation Wild Flower Hotline, which the native plant organization has been running for 36 years. Updated every Friday, the five-minute audio and written monologue helps wildflower seekers identify current hotspots, and this year’s super bloom has made the hotline extra popular.

The soothing recording belies how unpredictable California wildflowers are. Every year, a new array of blossoms appears at different times, in patterns botanists have yet to figure out. Thankfully, Lorrae Fuentes, who compiles information from around the state to write the updates, is calm about the whole process. She spends every spring collecting weekly reports on blooming activity from national parks, state preserves, public gardens and botanists friends who recognize a travel-worthy patch of wildflowers when they see one. Her reports could still hold value in years to come as biologists continue to figure out what natural forces govern native blooms.

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The earliest reports trickle in from California’s valleys. In this state, says Fuentes, lower elevations experience warmer, bloom-inducing temperatures first. Staff from Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, for example, might have some of the first news, though the area sometimes blossoms into plants like sand verbenas or desert sunflowers before the hotline even begins. “Spring arrives almost in the middle of winter down there,” says Dave Neumer, who reported to the hotline from L.A. County parks for several years. Neumer’s coworker, Oliva Miseroy, has taken over the task this spring. Her weekly inspections of the county’s 14 wildlife sanctuaries and her home park, Devil’s Punchbowl, sometimes requires plant verification with apps like iNaturalist or Calflora. She’s new to the job, and there are hundreds of species to get to know. “Because they bloom only just a couple weeks out of the year, I refresh myself every season,” she says. As temperatures rise, flowers in the lower regions fade while those in more elevated sites, like Devil’s Punchbowl and the high desert in Joshua Tree National Park, open up, giving staff and volunteers something to report.

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That vague pattern is about all Fuentes can expect every year. Botanists know that heavy winter rains encourage blossoms, and Neumer takes those storms personally. “I get kinda bummed out in drought years, and I’m hoping all summer long we get rains in winter,” he says. Besides rain, wildflower experts have little information about what sparks a certain plant to grow from seed and dominate a field. “Just about the time they figure out why one species works well in one year and not others, their theory is out the window,” says Neumer. That means some Mondays, Fuentes puts out the call for reports but hears very little by Wednesday, when she wraps up writing a new post. Other weeks, she’ll get updates from nearly 20 different locations. On top of that uncertainty, a day of extreme weather can ruin a flowering, making the hotline outdated before it’s even published. A few weeks ago, for example, Fuentes saw that high winds were in the forecast, which meant that any poppies on the brink of blooming would stay closed.

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Fuentes is practical about the upheaval. “if I had any control over it, I wouldn't be doing this job,” she says. She mostly ignores weather reports and instead, turns the lists of species into narratives of what a visitor might see. A recent breakdown of the scene at Figueroa Mountain in the Los Padres National Forest, for example, explains what someone would see out their window while driving from the mountain base all the way past the lookout point. Landscape descriptions come from Fuentes’ own knowledge of the species—or she speculates, with the help of CalFlora.org. She has also hiked many of these locations, so Fuentes weaves in what she knows about traveling around each spot, like where in Anza Borrego Desert Park it's worth getting out of your car to peek into sandy washes or canyons.

Fuentes has a relaxed attitude towards the bloom, but others spring into adrenaline-fueled action. “I actually feel quite a bit of stress, because I’m frantically figuring out all the places I need to be to document the bloom and understand what’s going on, and you can’t be in 12 places at once,” says Naomi Fraga, the director of conservation programs at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. Fraga studies California native plant diversity and how far each species can range, so the springtime has her taking 4x4 vehicles and long hikes deep into the state’s wilderness to observe all she can. If she happens to be in a place where tourists might visit, Fraga sometimes sends in reports to Fuentes, a former coworker of hers. “By the time May rolls around, most areas are finished,” she says. “So for two months, you have this opp to study the bloom, and that’s it—then you have to wait for the next opportunity, and I don’t know when that will come.”

Her job could be easier if biologists knew what conditions make certain flowers bloom, a discovery process that Fraga thinks the hotline can aid. The updates might not be run to scientific standards, but they do record what is in abundance in the same places each year, much like early historical accounts of the springtime blooms, says Fraga. Researchers could pair the anecdotal evidence with weather data and help build a track record for a species to see what a plant needs to sprout.

Those insights could give Fraga, and so many botanists, a chance to prepare for generous blossoming and their associated research opportunities. As it is, the professionals are eking out what they can from their current predictive tool. Pretty much everyone in her field watches the weather obsessively during the winter, tracking where they should look for floral explosions in the spring, says Fraga. California may be popular for the range of diverse species it offers, but biologists are still discovering the full range of life in places like the Mojave Desert. This year’s massive bloom could draw all kinds of yet-to-be-documented species out of the ground, which makes Fraga’s work that much more urgent. “Sometimes I think, when will I get to see this again? Will it be 10 years from now, will it be 20 years from now?” she asks. She and her colleagues may not know, but year by year, their data—and the backlog of Joe Spano’s recordings—might help them figure it out.

'Botanical Sexism' Could Be Behind Your Seasonal Allergies

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Men ruin everything.

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One day this past April, the residents of Durham, North Carolina, saw the sky turn a peculiar but familiar shade of chartreuse. Enormous clouds of a fine, yellow-green powder engulfed the city. It looked, and felt, like the end of the world. “Your car was suddenly yellow, the sidewalk was yellow, the roof of your house was yellow,” says Kevin Lilley, assistant director of the city’s landscape services. Residents, quite fittingly, called it a “pollenpocalypse.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, based on the news lately, males were responsible.

Male trees are one of the most significant reasons why allergies have gotten so bad for citydwellers in recent decades. They’re indiscriminate, spewing their gametes in every direction. They can’t help it—it’s what evolution built them for. This is fine in the wild, where female trees trap pollen to fertilize their seeds. But urban forestry is dominated by male trees, so cities are coated in their pollen. Tom Ogren, horticulturalist and author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping, was the first to link exacerbated allergies with urban planting policy, which he calls “botanical sexism.”

In trees—just like in humans—gender exists beyond the binary of female and male. Some, such as cedar, mulberry, and ash trees, are dioecious, meaning each plant is distinctly female or male. Others, such as oak, pine, and fig trees are monoecious, meaning they have male and female flowers on the same plant. It’s easy to identify female trees or parts—they’re the ones with seeds. And yet more, such as hazelnut and apple trees, produce “perfect” flowers that contain male and female parts within a single blossom. But while both monoecious and male dioecious trees produce pollen, Ogren claims the latter are primarily to blame for our sneezes and watery eyes.

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Ogren has been talking about this botanical misogyny for over 30 years. After buying a house in San Luis Obispo with his wife, who suffers from allergies and asthma, Ogren wanted to get rid of anything on his property that might trigger an attack. He began examining the neighborhood, plant by plant, when he noticed something unusual: All the trees were male.

At first, he thought this pattern may just have been a strange quirk of one city. But when he studied frequently landscaped plants in other cities, he noticed the same thing: males, all the way down. “Right away I started realizing there was something weird going on,” he says. While tracking down the origin of this trend, Ogren stumbled upon perhaps the first trace of sexism in urban landscaping in a 1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture. The book advised: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.”

Urban forestry’s apparent sexism seems to boil down to our distaste for litter. The USDA reasoned that tiny allergenic spores are likely to be blown away by wind or washed away by rain, making pollen an easier civic task to manage than, say, overripe fruit or heavy seed pods that would need to be cleaned up by actual humans.

The preference indicated by the USDA recommendation is one element of the story—the other is something more tragic, from an arborial perspective. In the first half of the 20th century, lush, hermaphroditic, not-so-allergenic elm trees towered over many American streets. But in the 1960s, a virulent strain of Dutch elm disease, a fungal illness spread by the bark beetle, stowed away on a shipment of logs from Britain. The fungus wiped out some of American cities’ longest-lived trees and left many streets almost entirely devoid of green or shade. By 1989, an estimated 75 percent of North America’s 77 million elms were dead, according to The New York Times.

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City planners and landscapers repopulated the nation’s barren, sun-scoured streets, according to USDA guidelines, with more than 100 new varieties of maple clones, Ogren says, all male. Over the years, male willow, poplar, ash, mulberry, aspen, and pepper trees joined them. As these trees matured, they shed increasing quantities of pollen. Nurseries began selling more male plants, too, in part because it is easier to clone an existing tree than to wait for males and females to pollinate each other naturally. Now, it’s not just trees and shrubs, but ornamental plants sold in urban nurseries that skew male. “Botanical sexism runs deep,” Ogren says.

In a cruel kind of irony, if urban landscapers had prioritized female trees in the same way, neither pollen nor unsightly seeds or fruit would be much of an issue. “If they had done it the opposite and planted hundreds of female trees with no males, it would have been just as sterile and tidy, without any pollen,” Ogren says. “Female trees don’t make fruits or seeds if there are no males around.” A large tree will scatter the majority of its pollen within 20 or 30 feet from its roots, Ogren says, so relatively isolated female trees simply wouldn’t bear much fruit.

Another argument proffered against female trees is that certain ones can produce an unpleasant odor. For example, when a lady gingko tree is in heat, it produces an odor not dissimilar to rotting fish or vomit. Ogren cedes this point. But if a city planted only female gingkos, decreasing the chance of fertilization, there would be neither pollen nor its infamously noxious postcoital odor, he says.

Ogren sees gingko gametes as the far greater threat. Unlike almost every other plant, gingko trees produce motile sperm, capable of swimming in pursuit of germination. Where human sperm each have a single tail, or flagellum, gingko sperm have around a thousand. “Once the pollen gets in your nose, it will germinate and start swimming up there to get to where it’s going,” Ogren says. “It’s pretty invasive.”

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To guide cities to plant less allergenic trees, Ogren developed the Ogren Plant Allergy Scale (OPALS). The scale rates plants from 1–10 based on their allergy potential. But while certain institutions, such as Ogren’s hometown of San Luis Obispo and the California Public Health Department, have consulted OPALS while landscaping new developments, cities have been generally slow on the uptake. “It’s much harder to make changes when everything is already planted,” Ogren says. “Nobody wants to cut down trees.” Instead, Ogren wants cities to replace dead or dying trees with low-allergy options, such as hawthorn, mountain ash, and serviceberry trees. In certain cases, such as around daycares and hospitals, Ogren advocates actively removing extraordinarily allergenic species such as male elder, yew, and mulberry trees. (For most people, urban allergies are a seasonal nuisance. But for vulnerable populations, such as children or adults with respiratory conditions, they can be much more serious—even deadly.)

Most of Ogren’s current battles are hyper-local. He recently walked by a children’s center in Santa Barbara where a massive Podocarpus tree (a 10 on OPALS) was planted by the entrance. “It had so much pollen that if you flicked your finger on a leaf, a huge cloud would spurt out,” Ogren says. “So now I’m in a fight with the city of Santa Barbara.” Ogren’s proposal isn’t to chop down the tree but to have it regularly cut back, which would slow pollen production. In comparison, female Podocarpus trees produce a fruit around the size of an olive—and are a 1 on OPALS.

Though the biology behind Ogren’s idea passes muster in the field of urban forestry, many experts shy away from his terminology. Paul Ries, the director Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, sees botanical sexism as just one arm of the larger, historical problem of lack of diversity in urban forests. “Anytime we plant an overabundance of one type of tree, whether it is a single species, a genus, or, in the case of so-called ‘botanical sexism,’ male trees, there are bound to be problems,” Ries says. He cites the downfall of species that were widely and homogeneously planted, such as Bradford pear and ash trees, the latter of which are fighting a losing battle against an invasive, wood-chomping beetle called the emerald ash borer.

Still, Ries believes Ogren is on to something, adding that he’d like to see more research on the unintended effects of over-planting male trees. “I just wouldn’t call it sexism. Ascribing a real-life human problem to the botanical world might seem like we’re trivializing what humans, particularly women, face,” he says.

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Terminology aside, the problem shows no signs of getting better. Unsurprisingly, climate change isn’t helping. According to a recent study in Lancet Planetary Health, the increase in extreme temperatures contributes to more potent allergy seasons. Summers come earlier and last longer, and certain species, such as cypress and juniper, have begun blooming again in the fall, Ogren says. In Durham, Lilley says he’s never seen anything as monumental as April’s pollen clouds in the city before. While it’s hard to say if the yellow sky was directly linked to climate change, pollenpocalypses will only become more and more common. It’s easy to see these clouds as freak occurrences—like a megadrought or superstorm—but they may be a sign of things to come.

Durham is far from the most pollen-polluted city in America. That superlative belongs to Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Durham ranks 67th, according to a 2018 report from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.). But Durham now has the unusual potential to radically diversify the makeup of its botanical residents, as the majority of its trees are approaching their twilight years. In the 1930s and 1940s, the city’s public works department oversaw a massive urban forestation effort that saw thousands of willow oaks planted within the city limits. Though they thrived for nearly a century, the oaks are reaching senescence. Under Lilley’s guidance, Durham has begun to reforest with a more diverse array of trees, including pines, maples, elms, dogwoods, and cherries.

Durham has no official guidelines for what kinds of trees can or will be planted, though the city does ban female gingkos. “The sex of the tree isn’t something we pay attention to,” Lilley says, adding that he hadn’t heard of the concept of botanical sexism. But he says Durham makes an effort to plant mostly monoecious trees, or ones with both male and female parts.

Ogren sexes trees wherever he goes; he can’t help it. He recently visited Sacramento for a conference and saw a dozen cedar trees planted by the capitol building—all males. On a recent trip to London, he spotted a veritable forest of male sweet bay trees. He was asked to give a lecture on botanical sexism in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he spent the entire day hunting around the city for a single female Podacarpus totara tree (spoiler alert: males, the lot of them). “A big part of the problem is most people don’t know much about trees, and think, well, trees are good and no trees are bad,” he says. “But trees are just like people, they have a multitude of differences. Some trees are human-friendly, and some are just the opposite.”


For Sale: A Poisoner’s Lab Secreted in a Beautiful Book

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Another reminder that covers can't be trusted.

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If you need a place to hide a secret stash, you have a few options. There’s the standard subterranean vault, protected by stairs, bolts, and darkness. Or maybe a hole somewhere remote and untrammeled, insulated by both vegetation and inconvenience. If you want to easy access—a secret in plain sight, with a bit of a wink—there’s the classic piece of spycraft, the hollowed-out book.

These sneaky little treasuries go by many names, including “book safes.” They’re easy enough to buy, or even make, and they’re useful for all kinds of things besides holding a secret: corralling cords and remote controls, storing a little cash for a rainy day, or keeping a treasured memento.

Unsurprisingly, not-quite-books have sometimes served nefarious aims. In the 1960s, two kids in New Haven, Connecticut, took a razor blade to a 400-page tome and then wandered in and out of shops, stowing little stolen items along the way. The following decade, a man tucked a gun inside a hollowed copy of The Rich Are Different, and used it to rob a bank in Mount Vernon, New York. (Bond villain Red Grant did something similar in the 1963 film From Russia With Love, slyly hiding a gun inside a copy of War and Peace.) And for one creative person in 19th-century Germany, a book safe may have been perfect place for an arsenal of “poisons.”

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At first glance, this object would be right at home on any shelf, with the binding and block that appears to be from a volume by Portuguese theologian Sebastião Barradas, published posthumously in 1640, according to INLIBRIS, an antique bookseller based in Vienna. But crack it open, and things look quite different—and extremely macabre.

It is lined with red, marbled paper. On the inside cover, two skeletons hold a banner reading: “Statutum est hominibus semel mori,” or “All people are destined to die once.” It’s Hebrews 9:27, and it wouldn’t be nearly as ominous if it wasn’t next to 10 little drawers labeled with names of poisonous plants, and a mirrored shelf holding several little glass bottles.

The compartments bear the German names for hemlock, wolfsbane, foxglove, and more—all lethal, properly administered—and the suggestion seems to be that the little vials are there for a would-be poisoner to mix up their own deadly cocktails.

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The team at INLIBRIS is currently offering this morbid curio via AbeBooks. The truth behind it might be less exciting than the appearance, as the sellers believe it was likely a 19th-century prank that used 17th-century supplies. Putting a precise date on these types of assembled objects can be tricky, because “they’re all meant to look old,” says book conservator Mindell Dubansky, author of an actual book called Blook: The Art of Books That Aren’t. This item may have been a novelty or a souvenir, reaching for an older aesthetic to boost its cachet. In any event, there’s no indication that the fake book ever really killed anyone.

While book-like objects with a medical bent or a whiff of the wunderkammer aren’t total anomalies—Dubansky has seen old bloodletting kits and microscope slides stored this way—this particular take on the concept is “a real curiosity,” says Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, in an email. “I’ve not seen anything like it.” If you can part with nearly $11,000, this grim little wonder can sit on your bookshelf. Please use it responsibly.

On Java’s Coast, A Natural Approach to Holding Back the Waters

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Villagers are using natural wooden barriers to try to restore the mangrove forests and save their lands and homes.

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This story was originally published by Yale E360 and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

To reach Timbulsloko, a village on the north coast of the Indonesian island of Java, we drove for three miles along a narrow causeway. All the way, there were lines of houses strung out on either side of the road. But behind them, rather than fields, there was only water, punctuated by half-submerged fences and the remnants of dykes. Something, it was clear, had gone badly wrong here.

Two decades before, this had been all land; but since then, the ocean had steadily invaded. Richer residents along the road were rebuilding their houses on new, higher foundations to keep above the rising tides. Other houses were inundated, abandoned, or marooned on tiny islands that could only be reached by rickety walkways. The village cemetery was being washed away—locals said lapping waters occasionally floated decomposing bodies into their living rooms.

At the far end of the causeway, in the meeting hall, village leaders discussed the plight of their community and remembered the old days, before the water came. The village of 3,500 people had been on a prosperous, rice-growing river delta, famous for its fertile soils and protected from the ocean by a wide belt of mangroves. “I grew up in the 1960s when the sea was more than a mile away,” said Slamet, a fisherman. “Then the flooding began.”

Beside him, the community activist Mat Sairi admitted that the village had made mistakes back then. Like almost every other coastal community in the area, they had wanted to make money by raising prawns and milkfish. So they converted their rice fields into ponds and began cutting down the mangroves along the shore to make more.

“Our parents warned us that we should protect the mangroves,” he remembered. “They said the mangroves provided many benefits, like the oysters, crabs, and fish among their roots, as well as protection of the coastline. But our people wanted to make money and feed their families.”

With the protective mangroves mostly gone, the sea began to wash away the dykes that surrounded the ponds. By 2013, it had penetrated inland for about a mile. The village has lost 25 rows of fish ponds, Sairi said. Now the waters lapped at their houses along the raised causeway. Other nearby villages had been entirely washed away. They feared they might be next. But they had a plan that they believed would save them, by encouraging nature to restore the mangroves.


Indonesia, an archipelago of about 18,000 islands, has vast areas of low-lying coast. Once the sea was kept at bay by dense thickets of saltwater-tolerant mangroves. Indonesia still has more mangroves than anywhere else, but it is under huge pressure. The country is now the world’s fourth most populous, and Java is its most densely populated island. As its coastal lowlands have become more crowded, Java has lost 70 percent of its mangroves to rice fields, fish ponds, and other economic activities such as ports and industrial areas, opening up the coastline to rapid erosion.

Nowhere has suffered more than Timbulsloko and a string of neighboring villages in Demak, a low-lying district on the island’s north shore. At a meeting in Demak in late 2018, officials told me that more than seven square miles of the district had been permanently inundated. In places, the coastline has retreated by more than two miles. In 2017 alone, more than 500 people lost their homes, and a thousand fish ponds covering 1,250 acres had been swamped. They predict the future loss of another 25 square miles.

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My tour of Demak villages revealed the human stories behind this tragedy. Like Timbulsloko, the village of Bedono was strung out along a raised road now surrounded by sea. Its main community building was built on stilts and nicknamed Bedono Island. Mudskippers and crabs scurried in the muck beneath. “Before, we had a good life with rice and fish,” said the young village head, Agus Salim. “Now we only have a memory of agricultural land.”

At Wedung, many of their fish ponds were gone. “We’ve lost 500 meters [1,640 feet] to the sea in the last 10 years,” said Maskur, a teacher on the village committee, as our boat headed out into a new bay that was unmarked on any maps. “I bought 10 hectares [25 acres] of ponds here in 2004, but three years later they were swept away,” said his deputy, Nor Khamed. “If God wants it to happen, it will,” he said with a shrug as a call to prayer rang out from the village mosque.

But other villagers along the coast were less fatalistic. “We are not leaving,” said Slamet in Timbulsloko. “This is our home and, God willing, we plan to stay.” Timbulsloko is one of several villages that have banded together to restore their coastline. But rather than calling on the authorities to put up concrete seawalls, they hope to get back their lost land in a novel way.

We clambered aboard a boat from the end of the causeway to view a series of long permeable brushwood structures that they had erected in shallow waters that were once productive fields. The structures were rather like outsize nets on tennis courts, each more than 550 feet long and rising more than three feet above the waves. They were made up of two lines of vertical bamboo poles hammered six feet into the sea bed, with the gap between them filled by a mass of horizontal brushwood, held in place by netting.

The structures are not intended to keep out the water, which washes through. Instead, their purpose is to slow the waves coming off the Java Sea so that the tiny particles of sediment carried in the water will drop down and collect on the landward side of the structure, says Femke Tonneijck of the Netherlands-based NGO Wetlands International, which introduced the idea as part of a plan to revive mangroves in coastal regions around the world.

In essence, they are a tropical version of a traditional Dutch technique for catching sediment in salt marshes along the shores of the North Sea. The hope in Java is that the deposited sediment will provide a stable base where mangrove seeds floating in the water will germinate and grow, she says. The mangroves will collect yet more sediment, and slowly restore the coastline. After that, the brushwood structures will no longer be needed.

Timbulsloko was the first village to volunteer to erect these odd-looking structures, said Sairi, chair of the village group set up to build them. Construction had been hard work. Each required the labor of 25 people for four weeks. There had been teething problems. After clams began to eat the original vertical bamboo poles, they substituted PVC pipes filled with concrete. Others repairs were needed after storms.

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But the structures were doing their job. When we reached the first, Sairi put a paddle into the water on either side of the barrier to check the depth. Eight months after its installation, the sea bed was already six inches higher on the landward side. In places, two feet had been added. The eroding shore was starting to rebuild.

By late 2018, nine villages in Demak had erected the brushwood barriers, which were catching sediment along almost 10 miles of coastline. If all goes to plan, they will eventually recreate a green belt of mangroves that will restore the entire coastline, protecting communities and creating new wetland habitat for water birds such as egrets, herons, and the endangered milky stork, said Yus Rusila Noor, Wetlands International’s biodiversity specialist.

The villagers are not paid to install the structures. Instead, Wetlands International and its collaborators offer them a deal. In return for their labor, they receive field training in coastal management, plus loans totaling more than $300,000 for local sustainable development projects.

These projects have included making organic fertilizers to improve the output of their surviving fish ponds, buying small desalination plants to make the delta water drinkable, and setting up small attractions for tourists. Building boardwalks through newly planted mangroves was a project chosen by some villages. One I visited on the riverbank near Wedung had a bamboo mock-up of a miniature Eiffel Tower as an elaborate gateway.

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Under the deals with the villages, if the barriers are kept repaired, the loans are written off. That has largely happened. At the end of 2018, ownership of the structures in several villages was formally transferred to the communities, with local authorities agreeing to fund future repairs.

The structures exemplify an approach that Wetlands International calls “building with nature”—finding ways to use the forces of nature to solve problems such as coastal erosion. They have undoubtedly halted the rapid erosion of the coastline and begin to nudge it towards recovery. But the outstanding question is whether the mangroves will return and ensure the process continues.

During my visit, project leaders had their fingers firmly crossed. Recently, Apri Susanto Astra of Wetlands International Indonesia provided an update. “Several locations behind the permeable structures have shown indications of natural mangrove growth,” he said. But it is early days yet. “If the natural mangrove growth does not occur, it can be helped by spreading seeds on the new sediment,” he said.

Land subsidence caused by groundwater pumping for industries along the coast is a growing concern. It could, some fear, ultimately negate the benefits from the structures. But the Indonesian government is impressed enough with progress so far that it is adopting the “building with nature” approach, designing variants on the permeable structures to protect vulnerable sandy coastlines, riverbanks, coral reefs, and even the country’s capital, Jakarta.

What began a decade ago in Timbulsloko in response to a local crisis is rapidly turning into a grand plan to deploy natural solutions to help protect a nation with more coastline than any other. And the ambition is growing.

Mangroves are increasingly being seen by environmental groups not just as a means to protect communities from some of the worst effects of climate change, but also as a tool for helping prevent climate change in the first place. Along with other coastal ecosystems such as salt marshes and sea grasses, mangroves offer a fast and efficient means of catching and storing more carbon in natural ecosystems, so keeping it out of the atmosphere. This “blue carbon” outperforms most rainforests.

An acre of mangroves will typically take about 2.8 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In existing mangrove forests globally, that currently adds up to more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year.

Moreover, as individual mangroves die, much of their carbon accumulates in waterlogged sediment, rather than rotting and returning to the atmosphere, which is normally the case for terrestrial forests. Carbon deposits have been found in mangrove sediments that are as thick as peat bogs and thousands of years old.

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Few restoration projects have yet been launched specifically for their carbon-catching, but many current projects are being assessed to determine if they might attract tradeable carbon credits under international climate agreements or help corporations reduce their carbon footprints. These include restoration of mangroves and coastal wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi River and in the Florida Everglades; returning mangroves to abandoned shrimp ponds in Thailand and India’s Ganges delta; remaking salt marshes along the Dutch coast of the North Sea; and bringing back lost eelgrass in the Virginia Coast Reserve, which The Nature Conservancy calls the “largest seagrass restoration project in the world.”

The world’s richest blue-carbon stores are in Indonesia’s mangroves and sea grasses. They still contain an estimated 3.5 billion tons of carbon. Globally, coastal wetland ecosystems currently hold up to 25 billion tons of “blue carbon,” according to an assessment carried out in 2018 by the National Academy of Sciences.

As those ecosystems succumb to development, the store is diminishing. But new policies to protect and revive coastal wetlands could turn the tide. Daniel Murdiyarso at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research says restoring mangroves could simultaneously allow Indonesia to meet its climate targets, build resilience against rising tides, and improve the livelihoods of millions of coastal inhabitants.

Indonesia was one of 28 nations to include mangrove restoration as part of its national climate plan at the Paris climate conference in 2015. In 2018, it unveiled a National Mangrove Ecosystem Management Strategy supported by President Joko Widodo, who was re-elected for a new term in April 2019. If Widodo is as good as his word, then the tides could be held back, and besieged villages like Timbulsloko may yet survive.

Fred Pearce traveled to Java with Wetlands International, for whom he is writing a book, Water Lands.

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To Save India's Camel Culture, a New Dairy Is Selling Milk and Cream Cheese

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The ungulate population has dropped precipitously.

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You can see by the way they’ve been dressed that the camels at the Pushkar Fair are well-loved. Festooned in tassels, beads, and brightly colored shawls, they emerge from the Thar Desert with their handlers each November, converging on the town of Pushkar in India’s western state of Rajasthan for a week of celebrations, religious observances, and livestock trading. All told, more than 200,000 visitors flock to Pushkar each year for the country’s (and some claim the world’s) largest camel trading event. But despite the eye-catching ensembles and the festival’s popularity, the number of camel sales has plunged in recent years. So, too, have the number of camels.

Believed to be home to 80 percent of India’s total camel population, Rajasthan had well over one million of them for much of the 20th century. Nomadic and pastoral minorities such as the Bishnoi, Gujjar, and Raika owned most, caring for them as if they were their children.

“The Raika actually believe they were created by God Shiva to take care of the camels,” said Dr. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a veterinarian who first came to Rajasthan in 1991 to study camel socioeconomics, and who works with the Raika and their camels.

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This belief contributes to cultural practices such as not eating their meat, giving away the milk for free, and not selling female camels to anyone outside of the community to ensure the herd’s continued growth. But the Raika will sell male camels to be draft animals that can help with farm work or transport. They were once in high demand at the Pushkar Fair, making camel herding a profitable business for the Raika. Endearingly, the Raika’s camels are known for their friendly natures; even a stranger can expect to be greeted and nuzzled by female camels.

While camels are treasured by nomadic groups, they also benefit the entire region’s ecology. For much of the year, the Raika guide their herds on migration routes through an area of Rajasthan called Kumbhalgarh. The camels graze on vegetation overlooked by other livestock, and farmers allow the herds to cross through their land, believing that the dung can increase crop yields by 50 percent. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation also considers camels an important species for future food security in arid zones.

Over the past several decades, though, the Raika have lost the ability to support themselves and their water-storing friends through camel herding. In the 1990s, greater availability of roads and cars in Rajasthan made transport by camel less popular. An outbreak of Trypanosomiasis further endangered the herds. Jodhpur native Hanwant Singh Rathore, whose grandfather had been a famous camel rider and trader, founded Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan (LPPS) with Köhler-Rollefson to help the Raika manage the disease. Hindi for “welfare organization for livestock keepers,” LPPS would continue to play a crucial role in the Raika community even after they brought Trypanosomiasis under control.

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The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was the discovery in the early 2000s that some camels being sold at the Pushkar Fair were being taken out of Rajasthan and slaughtered for meat. The Raika appealed for help with the support of LPPS. The government took action, but not in the way they hoped. Legislation passed in 2015 banned the slaughter and transport of camels out of Rajasthan. This made it impossible for the Raika to sell to anyone from outside the state, thus eliminating their last source of income.

Drought and the loss of grazing lands to canal expansions and private wildlife sanctuaries have exacerbated the issue, making it just as difficult to keep camels as it is to sell them. Breeding has lessened, and families are giving up herds they’ve had for generations. Where there were once over one million camels, there are now fewer than 200,000.

“Nobody is buying camels, so nobody is keeping camels,” Rathore said in an interview with GlobalPost.

The loss of camels doesn’t just create a hole in Rajasthan’s biodiversity, but in India’s cultural diversity, too. With the central tenet of their caste disappearing, the Raika are abandoning their nomadic way of life for opportunities in the cities.

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Undaunted, LPPS set out to develop new forms of income using the camel byproducts the Raika had relied on for centuries. They started by convincing the Raika to sell their camels’ milk—an idea that went against their long-held beliefs—then worked with herders to supply it locally. In February of 2019, they cut the ribbon on the Kumbhalgarh Camel Dairy to much fanfare, clinking of milk-filled cups, and camel cheesecakes. For Rathore and Köhler-Rollefson, this center is key to allowing large numbers of Raika maintain their traditional, camel-centric lifestyle. In addition to cheese and milk, the dairy produces milk soap, wool textiles, and even paper made from dung. It’s the first micro-dairy of its kind in India, and not just because it exclusively processes camel milk.

“We do not have a bulk milk cooler, but quickly pasteurize the milk and then chill it down very fast before bottling and deep freezing it,” says Köhler-Rollefson. The frozen milk is then packed into styrofoam boxes and shipped directly to customers, many of whom seek out the milk for its alleged health benefits.

According to traditional knowledge, the camels graze on 36 plants in the area with medicinal properties. This produces milk that the dairy claims can help people with diabetes, high blood pressure, and autism. These are significant claims about nutrition—a field that is particularly challenging and resistant to firm conclusions. But they are being studied by scientists in journals such as Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. Camel milk is also slightly lower in total fat compared to cow milk, but has more iron and vitamin C.

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As for the Raika, they’ve adapted to the idea of selling the milk for profit. It’s either that or walk away from camel herding altogether.

“Now all Raika want to sell camel milk,” says Köhler-Rollefson. “We get dozens of phone calls most days from Raika who want to sell their milk, but we can't take it all at this point.”

At present, the Kumbhalgarh dairy can pasteurize, chill, and ship 200 liters of milk in about a day, but the potential milk supply outstrips demand. Köhler-Rollefson and Rathore hope to offer more opportunities to suppliers as interest in camel products grows. In addition to promoting the milk to Indians as a heritage health drink, they’re leveraging the novelty of camel products to draw in tourists. Ice cream seemed like the most novel and appealing product, but the team quickly learned that the “desert dessert” wouldn’t make it far with Rajasthan’s infrastructure.

“This requires a perfect cool chain, and with frequent electricity outages, this is just not guaranteed,” says Köhler-Rollefson.

Instead, they’ve shifted to making cream cheese in flavors such as garlic, green chili, black pepper, and red pepper, as well as the occasional batches of feta and halloumi. While delicious and more shelf-stable than ice cream, the switch came with its own set of challenges. The Raika haven’t traditionally made cheese, and camel milk doesn’t coagulate easily. Rathore and Köhler-Rollefson had to bring in master cheesemakers from Austria, Denmark, and Kenya to help them develop the recipes.

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For now, interested buyers can get the cheese directly from the dairy or when they stay at the Ranakpur Camel Lodge, both of which are on the LPPS campus in the town of Sadri. Soon, however, diners at restaurants inside the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur may be able to find Kumbhalgarh cheeses on the menu. The dairy has also been collaborating with Rajasthan’s heritage hotels to make it available to tourists across the state starting this October.

Even with the upscale vendors, camel products have a ways to go toward being an industry that can sustain an entire caste. There’s the issue of convincing Indians to drink the milk, which last October was described by Indian Express as needing to be “deodorised,” which LPPS and camel herders say is nonsense.

Despite the hurdles, the team at LPPS and the Kumbhalgarh dairy are hopeful. They’re pressing ahead with plans to promote the milk in Delhi supermarkets as the ultimate feel-good drink, one that is healthy for the buyer, supports the Raika, and protects camel breeds unique to Rajasthan from extinction. They’ve also received mentoring and support—Köhler-Rollefson has won a Rolex Award for Enterprise, which comes with a cash grant.

“We get a lot of help,” says Köhler-Rollefson. “Somehow the whole issue of saving the camels casts a spell over people.”

If You’re in England, Keep Your Eyes Peeled for This Iridescent Beetle

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Where, oh where, is the noble chafer?

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In grassy, sun-dappled orchards across England, where there are storied fruit trees with ample blossoms and yielding bark, there are bound to be noble chafer beetles (Gnorimus nobilis). But how many, exactly?

The little insects shimmer emerald, copper, and violet in the sun and alight on decades-old cherry, plum, and apple trees flanked by fallen, rotting wood. They’ve been known to live near the orchards of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire, in clusters in the New Forest and South Oxfordshire, and at least a few orchards in Buckinghamshire. But those orchard landscapes have shrunk over the past decades—and there’s concern that Brexit could squeeze them even more. It’s also possible that these glinting little insects are happily at home in places where no one has noticed them: At just two centimeters long, even adult beetles are easy to miss.

In June 2019, to figure out exactly where the noble chafers are living, and in what numbers, the People’s Trust for Endangered Species will be collaborating with Deborah Harvey, a postdoctoral research fellow at London’s Royal Holloway University, to summon them—and they’re recruiting beetle enthusiasts to pitch in.

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Researchers across the world have harnessed the enthusiasm of citizen scientists. Sometimes this is pretty passive—basically armchair ecology. Scientists have harvested geotags and other data from social media to gain insight into, for instance, the day that little flying ants take to the sky in buzzing clouds. The beetle survey will be an example of citizen scientists being more active out in the field.

Hints that you might have a noble chafer in your midst include frass, or tiny, pill-shaped pellets in the hollows of trees. For this upcoming survey, participants will be using specially engineered pheromones to lure the beetles into a little trap, mark them with a little spot, and report sightings. If you can hoof it to an English orchard in the coming weeks, maybe you can help.

Found: The Earliest Evidence of Humans Cooking and Eating Starch

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We were eating rhizomes and tubers as early as 120,000 years ago.

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Starches have been dietary staples for even longer than seemed possible. For the first time, archaeological evidence confirms that humans have been roasting and eating plant starches for up to 120,000 years—that’s more than 100,000 years longer than we’ve been able to farm them.

An international team of archaeologists identified traces of prehistoric starch consumption in the Klasies River Cave, in present-day South Africa. Analyzing small, ashy, undisturbed hearths inside the cave, the researchers found “fragments of charred starch plant tissue” ranging from around 120,000 to 65,000 years old, making them the oldest known examples of starches cooked and eaten by humans. The team recently published its findings in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The findings do not come as a complete surprise, but rather as welcome affirmation of older theories that had lacked the corresponding archaeological evidence. In a press release, the lead author Cynthia Larbey of the University of Cambridge said that there had previously only been genetic and biological evidence to suggest that humans had been eating starch for this long. This new evidence, however, takes us directly to the dinner table, and so supports the hypothesis that starch digestion genes evolved as a specific “adaptive response to an increased starch diet.”

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Co-author Sarah Wurz, an archaeologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, said that the starch remains show that these early humans were “ecological geniuses” who could “exploit their environments intelligently for suitable foods and perhaps medicines.” And as much as we all still crave the rhizomes and tubers—think starches such as ginger and potatoes—that these cave communities were grilling up on their foot-long hearths, they knew well enough to balance their diets as best they could, with protein and fats from local fish and other animals.

This research is part of an ongoing investigation into how Middle Stone Age communities interacted with and made use of plants and fire. The investigation dates back to the 1990s, when the archaeologist Hilary Deacon first suggested that these hearths contained charred plants. (At the time, the proper methods to examine the residue were not yet available.) We now know not only that Deacon was right, but also that human beings have always been undaunted in pursuit of their cravings. “Starch diet isn’t something that happens when we started farming,” said Larbey—it’s “as old as humans themselves.”

Solved: How the 'Monstrous' Iguanas of the Bahamas Got So Darn Big

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The secret's in the seabirds.

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Among the most popular tourist attractions in the Exumas—a chain of more than 365 tiny islands, or cays, in the Bahamas—are the famous swimming pigs. But for those who prefer to glimpse the native wildlife, iguanas are the real stars.

An endangered subspecies of iguana called the Allen Cays rock iguana has drawn John Iverson, a biology professor from Earlham College in Indiana, to the Exumas for the past four decades. These iguanas were once confined to just two islands, Leaf Cay and U Cay, but by the late 1990s Iverson noticed some had spread to nearby islands, especially Allen Cay. The simple explanation was that winds and currents had whisked baby iguanas across the 300-foot-wide channel separating Leaf and Allen Cays. There was just one problem: The iguanas on Allen Cay were relative giants, twice as long and six times as heavy as their counterparts on other islands.

“On Allen Cay, we encountered these monstrous iguanas… if you got bit by one of them, you would be in serious trouble,” says Iverson.

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He puzzled over how this tiny island could have turned its resident iguanas into Goliaths. In certain ways, it’s just like the other islands the subspecies inhabits. All are essentially predator-free (save for herons that will occasionally snatch a baby iguana). And all of the islands grow similar shrubs, grasses, and flowers for the plant-loving reptiles to eat.

At the same time, Allen Cay boasts far fewer white sand beaches than its neighbors. Instead, most of its surface is heavily pockmarked due to the honeycomb limestone that covers it. “There are holes everywhere. Some folks call it razor rock because the holes are like razors,” says Iverson. The cavities make the island treacherous for human visitors, but ideal for nesting seabirds. That’s why Allen Cay attracts a dense colony of brown and white Audubon’s shearwaters. Until recently, the island was also overrun with house mice that had been introduced by humans.

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Iverson began to suspect that these so-called vegetarian iguanas might be supplementing their diets with seabirds and mice. The scenario seemed to add up: If you take animals that eat plant matter and give them animal protein, they’ll grow faster, he reasoned.

He got in touch with Carolyn Kurle, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego who studies animal feeding ecology, and told her about the inexplicably enormous Bahamian iguanas. Then it clicked: “I knew we could solve this problem,” says Kurle. The solution lay in stable isotope analysis, a technique she’d spent years fine-tuning in her lab.

Stable isotopes such as nitrogen-15 are useful indicators of animal diets. Every time an animal eats, nitrogen-15 gets incorporated into its tissues. Plant-eaters’ tissues contain just a little bit of the isotope, and the levels increase as you move up the food chain to omnivores and carnivores.

By measuring stable isotopes in the big iguanas from Allen Cay and small iguanas from three neighboring islands, Kurle and her master’s student, Kristen Richardson, confirmed that the Allen Cay giants were true vegetarians—none had been noshing on birds or rodents.

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They also discovered that the plants on Allen Cay were much richer in nitrogen-15 than those on the other islands. The isotope was so prevalent in the plants that Kurle knew it must have come from an outside source, as ocean islands tend to be starved for nutrients. All eyes turned to the island’s colony of seabirds—or more specifically, their droppings.

“Seabirds leave the island and forage in the surrounding waters. They eat fish that are full of nutrients from the ocean. Once the seabirds process [the fish], all of the extra nutrients are pooped out on the island and that brings in tons of nutrients,” says Kurle. “It’s just like putting fertilizer into your garden.”

With their seabird poop-fertilized plants, the iguanas on Allen Cay were ingesting double the nutrients, in the form of nitrogen, that their peers were. And they were growing bigger because of it, the team reported in March in Oecologia.

“Researchers studying this subspecies have questioned the size difference between the populations for many years,” says Stesha Pasachnik, who co-chairs the IUCN Iguana Specialist Group. She believes the new findings have finally solved this long-standing mystery.

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For Iverson, the answer didn’t come soon enough. Eight years ago, two nonprofit organizations—the Bahamas National Trust and Island Conservation—jointly decided the mice on Allen Cay had to go. They had been killing baby seabirds and attracting barn owls from nearby islands, which, as it turned out, also had a taste for seabirds. The plan was to apply rodenticide to the island. But first, Iverson organized a team to catch as many giant iguanas as they could and temporarily move them to Flat Rock Reef Cay, an island already inhabited by iguanas, to keep them safe from the poison.

By the following year, 16 of the 18 transplanted iguanas had starved to death. “We didn’t know at that time that the plants on Flat Rock Reef Cay were not as nutritious as they were back home on Allen Cay,” says Iverson.

It was a devastating loss, though not a complete one. Giant iguanas can still be found on Allen Cay; Iverson estimates that between the survivors from Flat Rock Reef Cay and those that were never moved in the first place, fewer than 10 currently dwell there.

Iverson hopes that will change. He’s been working to fill in some of Allen Cay’s massive sinkholes with sand to create better iguana nesting grounds. With any luck, when he returns to the island this month, he’ll find a few hefty baby iguanas scampering around.

“Our fingers are crossed,” he says.

Germany Will Return a 15th-Century Cross to Namibia

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The 11-foot, 1.1-ton cross could once be glimpsed from the ocean.

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In 1486, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão erected an 11-foot stone cross on the coast of what is now Namibia to claim the land for his country. Called a padrão, the enormous cross became a navigational aid for ships sailing along the west coast of Africa until it was taken in the 1890s by a German sea captain and shipped off to Europe. On May 17, 2019, the German Historical Museum pledged to return the cross to Namibia in August as a part of a greater promise to reappropriate artifacts taken under colonial rule, according to the BBC.

Before it was taken, the padrão became one of the coast’s most visible landmarks and gave the coast its current name: Cape Cross. It shows up on a number of historical maps of the world, including Martin Waldseemüller’s 1500 map, according to a report from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. The cross was emblazoned with the Portuguese coat of arms and etched with inscriptions in Portuguese and Latin. After several centuries weathering harsh coastal weather, the cross began to slump into a tilt and could no longer be glimpsed from the ocean, according to a blog post from the German Historical Museum.

The whole thing weighs just over a ton, making it a remarkable if morally fraught feat for the German captain Gottlieb Becker to carry it back to Germany on his ship. Becker presented the cross to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in turn commissioned a new cross to replace the original. The new cross swapped out the Portuguese symbols with the German imperial eagle and inscriptions in German, according to the museum’s blog. In 1968, the Namibian government named the German cross a national monument. In 1980, a replica of the Portuguese cross was erected where the original once stood.

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Meanwhile, Cão’s original cross became a part of the permanent collection in Germany’s Zeughaus, one of the oldest buildings in Berlin. The building was converted into a military museum in 1875 and now holds the German Historical Museum. Namibia has since converted Cape Cross into a protected reserve for the world’s largest breeding colony of Cape fur seals.

In 2017, Namibia submitted an official request for the return of the padrão. In response to this request, the museum held a symposium in June 2018 to interrogate the questions of historical justice that swirl around the cross. After all, the cross is still a colonial object and not actual African artwork. But Namibia’s ambassador to Germany, Andreas Guibeb, called the return an “important as a step for us to reconcile with our colonial past and the trail of humiliation and systematic injustice that it left behind,” the BBC reports. This reconciliation is ongoing; just last year, Germany returned more than 25 skulls of Namibian genocide victims killed by the colonial government in 1905.


These Adventurous Women Photographed the California Desert in the 1920s

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We almost lost their work forever.

One average day in 1988, during his lunch break, the archeologist and historian Ron May climbed into a Dumpster outside his office building.

Earlier that day, a colleague had dropped by dragging a heavy plastic sack filled with black photo albums that appeared to be quite old. Though May was an environmental management specialist who reviewed history and archeology reports for the County of San Diego, sometimes workers at the Office of the Public Administrator would ask May to assess the historic value of items from unclaimed estates of the deceased, so this visit was not unusual. But when his colleague told him she'd recovered the photo albums after they were trashed by someone from the Public Administrator's—and that there were more photos still inside the Dumpster—May's curiosity was officially piqued. “I recognized this is stuff that should not have been thrown away,” May says.

Which is how he wound up among stacks of rotten food and smeared newspapers, urgently rescuing what turned out to be an extraordinary collection of black and white photographs taken by Susie Keef Smith, who died in 1988. Smith’s images, as well as pictures taken by her younger cousin Lula Mae Graves, are featured in the new book Postcards from Mecca, The California Desert Photographs of Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves, 1916-1936.

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Smith served as the postmaster for the town of Mecca, California, in the southern Coachella Valley, for almost a decade starting in 1926. It was in that capacity that she came in frequent contact with the unconventional characters, such as prospectors, who lived and worked in the harsh desert region to the east. She also aspired to take photos with her Graflex camera to sell as picture postcards, a popular product of the time. Much of her free time was therefore spent journeying to rugged and remote desert areas such as Mecca Mud Hills, Desert Hot Springs, and the Salton Sea by foot, burro, or Ford Model T.

Her travel companion, Graves, had come to California from Tennessee for her health (and, apparently, to escape an undesirable family situation back home). She lived with the Smith family, and also enjoyed looking through the camera lens. Together, Smith and Graves risked travel unchaperoned, often donning men’s clothing and cowboy hats. In their photos, they can be seen joyfully handling cameras, guns, and kingsnakes, while at the same time capturing on film all the wilderness they encountered.

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After he’d carefully cleaned the pictures he’d rescued from the Dumpster, the historian in May realized the material was worthy of archiving for future scholars. What especially grabbed his attention were Smith’s images from an early era of Southern California’s Corn Springs in the Chuckwalla Mountains. “Susie was documenting a period in the desert, especially the years 1910-1920, we know little about,” said May.

Graves shot black and white visions of prospectors with their burros, young aqueduct surveyors smiling in their tank tops and cowboy hats, and a human skeleton rotting in the dirt. Such images had long fascinated her grandson, the artist Warner Graves III, growing up, and which he treasured upon inheriting his grandmother’s photo albums of her adventurous youth.

Many of Smith’s photos were in Graves’s scrapbooks and vice versa; so intertwined are the photos that it’s sometimes unclear which woman clicked the shutter. The pictures came together as a book when its editor, whose original intent was to write about the solo adventures of Smith, was introduced in 2017 to Warner Graves III and his hundreds of photos by Lula Mae Graves. In comments included in the book, the younger Graves writes of his grandmother’s images, “...the photos conjure a lost world of seemingly greater freedoms and possibilities, as well as landscapes that have not survived the onslaught of our modern era.” May echoes a similar thought in the publication about the sense of history in the lost pictures he saved:

“What occurred to me is that these early 20th century photos are of places that no longer exist...Only crumbled rock foundations survive for young archeologists to try and interpret what they are seeing. And people misinterpret what is there now, yet Susie Keef Smith’s photos could help solve the mysteries.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book, published by the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association.

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Found: A New Plain of Massive Stone Jars in Laos, Used to Store the Dead

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The society responsible for them remains a mystery.

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According to local legend, the hundreds of gigantic stone vessels that stretch across the Xieng Khouang Plateau of Phonsavan, Laos, are simply ancient mugs, crafted by a tribe of giants to brew and store rice wine after battle. Another tale has it that they were simply hydration stations for thirsty traveling merchants. Archaeologists have a more macabre theory about the jars, that they were used to hold dead bodies before burial. New finds suggest the practice may have been more widespread than previously thought.

A team of archaeologists from the Australian National University (ANU), along with Lao government officials, uncovered 15 previously undocumented sites containing more than 100 stone jars dating back some 1,000 years. They were found in a mountainous forest region of central Laos during a survey by ANU Ph.D. student Nicholas Skopal. “The recent discovery increases our knowledge about the jars and dramatically expands the known geographic extent of this cultural practice,” says Louise Shewan, an archaeologist at Monash University in Australia and expedition coleader. “It is likely that many more sites exist, blanketed by thick forest cover.” The newly identified site has existed in obscurity for years, except for visits by tiger hunters.

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During the 1930s, French archaeologist Madeleine Colani was one of the first researchers to study the jars and survey the region. She discovered a few containing human ashes and a nearby cave filled with human bones. Colani presumed that the deceased bodies were held in the jars temporarily, after which the bones were buried. Very little additional research was conducted in the ensuing years because of war, which left undetonated ordnance scattered across the region. In the past decade, many of these old bombs have been removed, allowing researchers fresh access. New research will continue to elucidate the purpose of the jars, but the society that made them remains a mystery.

Researchers now believe this civilization was widely distributed, but little is known about who they were and how and why these sites were created. Archaeologists from ANU believe that the megaliths were quarried nearby and moved to their present locations. "But why these sites were chosen as the final resting place for the jars is still a mystery,” said ANU archaeologist Dougald O’Reilly, colead of the research expedition, via press release. There is also no other evidence of any group occupying this region, according to O’Reilly. The plot thickens.

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The team believes there may be a connection between these societies and others in the Assam region of India and Sulawesi in Indonesia, where structures reminiscent of the Lao jars have been found. Shewan hopes that future expeditions will reveal the missing link—an occupation site that can provide smaller, but no less intriguing, pieces of evidence.

A Wisconsin Bar Had an Enormous 1885 Circus Poster Hidden Within Its Walls

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It wasn't meant to survive nearly that long.

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Durand, Wisconsin, is an old railroad town on the banks of the Chippewa River. In the early 19th century, when traveling circuses were emerging as a popular form of entertainment, trackside towns such as Durand made natural stops for menageries of train cars holding camels, tigers, elephant-riders, and more. But of course, this was all before television and radio (and before concerns about animal welfare penetrated the circus world), so the only way to get the word out about the coming extravaganza was through signs and billboards plastered up in each town. In 2015, Durand resident Ron Berger unearthed one of these giant paper ads behind the wall of his local restaurant and bar, the Corral Bar & Riverside Grill. Recently, after years of work, it was unveiled.

“It’s a lithograph,” Berger says. “They would actually engrave carving wood blocks and make these big, giant stamps [for full sheets of paper] … then they’d stamp each individual color and stamp it again until all the colors were filled.” This 9-foot-high, 55-foot-long, multi-sheet, full-color circus poster (which clearly cites the date of the circus: Monday, August 17, 1885) runs the length of the wall—and all the way up to the Chippewa River. The only part that seems to be missing is a four-foot chunk that detailed a large aquarium with fantastical sea monsters (likely blown away by river winds). The company that printed the poster, Russell, Morgan & Co., was based in Cincinnati, which was, at the time, the lithograph capital of the world. “It was imperative that they made these [wood] blocks so they could duplicate the posters,” Berger says. “These posters were made for more than one show because they put them up all around the train routes.”

Berger’s family has occupied part of this building since 1977, when their restaurant first opened, but the side of the building that held this secret history wasn’t used by the family until 1996. During Labor Day weekend of 2015, Berger embarked on a renovation to make a dining room addition when he saw a blue-brown bison peeking out through the hole. It would be weeks before he revealed the rest of the circus scene, and saw that an important piece of entertainment history had fallen into his lap. He knew he had to preserve it. It took Berger and his team two years to totally remove the wall and restore what was behind it. “We had a very little budget and had to figure out just what to do,” Berger recalls.

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The circus that the poster promoted, the “Great Anglo-American Circus,” was world famous. It’s owner, Miles Orton, was known to ride horses bareback, standing up, with his two children standing on his shoulders and head. This whimsical stunt is illustrated on the poster in Durand. His trail of 24 circus train cars traveled all throughout the United States. That the poster from his visit to Durand has lasted, almost fully intact, for over a century, is a marvel.

“It was made to last only like a month or two after the show, so it could just fall apart and disappear. They were designed to not have to have a team come back to take them down,” Berger says. Allegedly, a group of inspired historians is now researching the circus’ train route—particularly through the state of Georgia—to find any more of these hidden advertisements that might have improbably survived. But according to Berger: “There could be one buried somewhere else but they’re made on paper so they’re not built to last. It’d have to be a perfect storm of someone building over it right after the show like this one was.”

Through his research, Berger has developed a working theory for how the poster got stuck behind the wall of his bar, formerly a hardware store. “I think they were in the process of building a saloon, and they were probably working on the foundation of that when the circus saw the river right there and they talked them into [waiting to build] until after the circus was done,” Berger says. “It was the perfect spot to put a billboard,” he says of the riverfront wall.

Today, the colorful circus poster, advertising everything from ostriches to aerialists, is protected behind a sheet of glass, and is visible to everyone who visits the Corral Bar & Riverside Grill. “We had to protect it from UV rays and people touching it,” Berger says. Now, we’ll see if the vintage lithograph has another 134 years in it … or more.

Being an Ottoman Janissary Meant War, Mutiny, and Baklava

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To overthrow the sultan, janissaries first threw over their cooking pots.

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In the spring of 1806, Istanbul was in uproar. Sultan Selim III wanted to modernize his military, with new uniforms and European-style fighting techniques. But other sultans had tried before, and failed. Reform required getting rid of the janissaries, a centuries-old class of soldiers. Unfortunately for Selim, the janissaries would soon give their usual sign of rebellion: publicly overturning their giant cooking pots. For the corps, whose traditions revolved around food, this amounted to a declaration of mutiny.

For centuries, the janissaries had been one of the most feared fighting forces in Europe. Trained as infantry from youth, it was the janissaries who breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453 and devastated Hungarian knights at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. “They were a modern army, long before Europe got its act together,” says Virginia H. Aksan, professor emeritus of history at McMaster University. “Europe was still riding around with great, big, heavy horses and knights.”

Decked out in glorious uniforms and alerting enemies to their presence with thunderous drums, they were “both a cause of terror and a source of admiration for the West,” writes historian Gilles Veinstein. Under a system likely established by Sultan Murad I in the 14th century, Ottoman authorities took boys from Christian families across the Ottoman Empire as a sort of tax. Called a “gathering,” or devşirme, the boys underwent stringent training as archers and later as musketeers, along with conversion to Islam.

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Accounts abound of Christian families, especially in the Balkans, doing all they could to keep their sons from being taken away. Yet if they became janissaries, the boys were freed and considered the “sons of the sultan,” Aksan says. The best of the best rose to positions of influence and power in the Ottoman bureaucracy. However, Veinstein notes, janissaries could be “a danger for the Ottoman rulers.” Should a sultan cross them, janissaries would rise in revolt.

Their signal to mutiny was overturning their massive cooking pots, or kazan. Tipping over a huge cauldron might seem like a goofy way to start a rebellion. But for janissaries, both the kazan and food in general were potent symbols. Accepting the sultan’s food was a sign of loyalty and dedication to him, writes Ottoman historian Amy Singer, and eating from the kazan helped “create group solidarity.”

The kazan also had a spiritual meaning. One legend held that Haci Bektas Veli, the founder of Bektashi Sufism, founded the janissaries and “served them soup from the ‘holy cauldron,’” writes Singer. Janissaries were often members of the Bektashi order, and to the Bektashi, “the hearth and home were sacred.” Used for Bektashi ceremonies, the cauldrons took on a similar significance to the janissaries. Contemporary illustrations of janissaries show lavishly dressed soldiers proudly parading along with their kazan.

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Every three months, when janissaries got their salaries, they paraded to Topkapi Palace, where they also received soup, pilaf, and saffron pudding. Each year during Ramadan, janissaries marched to the palace kitchens in the "Baklava Procession" to receive a massive amount of sweet treats. Well in advance of cauldron-flipping, any hesitance to receive food from the sultan was a warning that an orta, or regiment, was on the verge of mutiny.

Janissaries adopted cook-like titles as well. Their sergeants, the highest-ranking member of each corps, was the çorbacı, or the “soup cook.” According to Aksan, the janissary corps was referred to as the ocak, which meant the hearth. “That comes from the notion that they were the sultan's sons,” she says. “You have the household, and janissaries are an essential part of that.” Also gathered around the hearth, writes Singer, were “lower-ranking officers” with titles such as aşcis, or cook, and the kara kulluckçus, or scullion.

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In the early-16th century, janissaries numbered around 20,000, and that number would steadily increase. But the janissaries slowly lost power as a fighting force. Devşirme was abolished in 1638, and the ban on marriage faded as well. The sons of janissaries were allowed into the ranks, and soon free citizens vied to join. It wasn’t long before janissaries were running businesses while still expecting pay from the sultan. As Aksan notes in the Oxford Companion to Military History, by the end of the 17th century, their numbers had swelled to nearly 80,000, and in 1800, the rolls of the janissaries contained nearly 400,000 names. At that point the title was almost meaningless, and only around 10 percent “could be called upon to defend the empire.”

Yet woe betide the sultans who tried to replace the janissaries, or, Aksan notes, to debase the currency. Janissaries never appreciated either attempt, and the mutinies could be devastating. Despite their vaunted loyalty, janissaries deposed several sultans, starting with the murder of the teenage Osman II in 1622. He planned to dismantle the janissaries and, expecting defiance, he closed the coffee shops where they gathered. Rising up in revolt, janissaries killed him. Selim III was forced off his throne by the janissaries, and later murdered. In the end, janissaries became like the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome. Mutiny was their privilege, says Aksan, and sultans had to appease them.

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Aksan calls the janissaries “the central icons of the Ottoman’s heyday.” But as they lost battles across Europe and became more unruly at home, both the sultan and the public had enough. Sultan Mahmud II, seeking to modernize his military forces, had a brutal solution to disbanding the janissaries in 1826. The janissaries overturned their cauldrons at dawn on June 15, but the sultan had planned ahead. He destroyed their barracks with artillery and had them “mowed them down in the streets of Istanbul,” says Aksan. With survivors exiled and executed, it was an ignominious end for the sons of the sultan.

The Makeshift Mosques of Athens Are About to Disappear

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The Greek capital will soon open an official place of worship for the city's 200,000 Muslims.

Since the Ottomans left Greece over two centuries ago, Athens has been one of the few world capitals, and the last in Europe, without an official mosque. In the meantime, Athenian Muslims have had to find alternative ways to keep their faith.

According to the Muslim Association of Greece, the more than 200,000 Muslims who live in the Greek capital and Attica region that surrounds it have been trying for decades to get a proper place of worship. However, their demands have been thwarted, mostly due to political and religious reasons, as well as Greek bureaucracy. For a very long time, both the Greek Orthodox church and far-right political parties opposed the idea.

Without an official house of worship, individuals within the Muslim community began taking matters into their own hands and creating private worship spaces—at the beginning just for themselves and their families, but later open to everyone.

Athenian Muslims have transformed underground garages, empty basements, and rented apartments all around the city into cozy DIY mosques, each decorated with its owner’s individual taste and paid for exclusively with personal funds. According to MAG, it is estimated that within city limits, there are about 100 makeshift mosques. The majority of them are run by Sunni Muslims, although a few are operated by Shia individuals.

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Now, after years of stagnation, Athens will soon have its first official state-owned mosque in the area of Votanikos, close to the city center. The final project was approved by the Greek government in August 2016 and the total cost of almost $994,000 (887,000 euros) was funded entirely by the Greek government. The construction started in November the same year and three years later, after many delays, the mosque is set to open by the end of Ramadan. According to officials, the construction has finished and only the decorations are left before it opens its doors for the first time. It will have space for 350 people, only 50 of which would be for women. An imam was recently chosen by the administrative committee of the mosque: a 50-year-old Moroccan immigrant with Greek citizenship, who moved to the country 25 years ago.

This will mean the end for many of those private mosques. Only very few that follow certain regulations imposed by the Greek Ministry of Education, Research, and Religious Affairs will be authorized and continue to operate. At the time of publication, just six of those makeshift mosques have been granted permission to keep running. In the next few months, following the expected opening of the official mosque early June, the rest will be evaluated by the Ministry, who will decide which ones will stay open and which will be permanently locked down.

These photos offer a glimpse at these unofficial spaces of worship, before the vast majority may be forced to close for good.

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