A new artifact has been found by archaeologists in southwest Finland. The item, a wooden staff with a snake-like carving, was discovered in a wetland, and is believed to be an ancient shaman’s staff. The staff is estimated to be 4,400 years old, and was from a site that revealed a lot of well-preserved artifacts made of wood, bark, and bone: 

The shaman’s staff would have been used in a religious or spiritual ceremony. Perhaps it was even used to communicate with the dead, given that ancient people inhabiting what is now Finland believed in a “Land of the Dead” that was associated with wetlands. Shamans were also believed to be able to transform themselves into snakes, the researchers report, emphasizing the connection between the snake staff and the mystical realm. Other artifacts uncovered by the excavations include a wooden scoop with a bear’s head handle, wooden containers and paddles, fishing tools, pottery, and structural remains.

Organic materials such as wood typically degrade after a long period of time. But the staff was well-preserved because of the environmental conditions at the site where the object was discovered, known as Järvensuo 1. Because it is a wetland, Järvensuo has low oxygen and high humidity, allowing water-logged items to survive.

Image credit: Satu Koivisto

This particular theory is more subdued than the widely accepted theory for how the dinosaurs were wiped off the Earth. You’ve heard of the story many times: a massive asteroid hit the Earth during the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event and killed all the dinosaurs. What if this theory is not exactly accurate? New research published in Nature Communications suggests that these prehistoric creatures actually died due to a long decline: 

The asteroid may have been a death knell, but dinosaurs were on their way out long before Chicxulub made an appearance on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, the study suggests.

In fact, the decline in dinosaur populations likely began 76 million years ago during the Campanian period — 10 million years before the asteroid hit. The researchers write that two factors may have had the most impact on the dinosaur decline:

A changing climate (including cooling global temperatures)

The declining diversity of herbivorous dinosaurs

The dual blows that killed the dinosaurs were not necessarily the double asteroids, but environmental and population factors that emerged much earlier, the researchers say.

“Further analyses indicate that the global dinosaur decline could have been precipitated by the decline of herbivores,” Condamine explains, adding that herbivores are essential “keystone species” in ecosystems.

His research suggests dinosaurs weren’t able to recover from these dual blows. The rates of new species of dinosaurs emerging could not keep up with the extinction rates, leading to a decline in dinosaur diversity.

In fact, the dinosaur decline was so severe, Condamine and colleagues posit that the T-rex may have only had one species left on planet Earth by the time the asteroid made impact.

Image credit: Stephen Leonardi (Unsplash) 

Heartbreaking and disappointing. Imagine having a fun time with a potential significant other only to wake up and have your valuables taken from you! A woman managed to steal her date’s jewelry valued at a million dollars stored in the hotel safe. The news claims that the date stole the jewelry as the man slept in his hotel. Check out the full story here. 

Image credit: Immo Wegmann (Unsplash)

Meet Orland Capote, a 63-year-old Florida man who has refused nearly $1 million worth of offers for his home. His house, which is reminiscent of the home of the main character in Pixar’s Up, is now surrounded by luxury and high-end buildings. His two-bed, two-bath middle class home was purchased by his father in 1989, and contains memories for Capote that have no equivalent monetary value: 

“This was my father’s dream house,” said Capote. “It took 20 years for him to find it. This house is like a hard drive. As I look around and live in it and move through it, I relive a lot of memories that I could not find in another house. The house is my soul. So what good is it to sell your soul for all the money in the world?”

Capote’s home has been engulfed by the commercial Agave Ponce LLC development for years now. Once a quiet residential block, his neighbors will soon consist of office space, stores, condominiums, and 242 luxury hotel rooms.

Despite those high-end prospects — and constant construction noise and debris littering his yard, Capote refuses to leave.

Cherished memories, such as Capote’s father tending to the mango trees in the yard, linger in the homeowner’s mind to this day. And the home’s sentimental value only grew his parents died.

Capote lost his father in 2005, after which he inherited the house. He lived there with his mother until last year, when she died, still fighting the city of Coral Gables over the development. But before she died, Capote’s mother asked that he never sell the “family treasure.”

He still hasn’t. And speaking of the offers he has received to relocate, Capote says he doesn’t want to risk leaving and losing his cherished memories.

Image credit: CBSMiami

Any time you hear the term "monkey glands" in some old movie, you can be sure it's a reference to Dr. Serge Voronoff, whose work became famous in the 1920s. The Russian-born French surgeon was a pioneer in transplanting organs- although the organs he was transplanting were animal testicles, or parts of them, into human scrotums. It wasn't in order to replace a man's gonads, but to "rejuvenate" them.  

The first official transplant of a monkey gland into a human body was performed on June 12, 1920. Three years later, Voronoff’s work was applauded by more than 700 scientists at the International Congress of Surgeons in London. The transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another had become a experimental trend in the field of medicine as early as the end of the 19th century. Around this time, Voronoff had been studying the effects of castration in Egypt, which would later inform his work on rejuvenating treatments. By 1920, he was conducting his first transplants between chimpanzees and humans. For a brief time, he was using the testicles of executed criminals to transplant into his wealthy clients, but when the demand eventually became too great, he had to open a monkey farm breeding facility on the Italian Riviera. During his career, Voronoff also performed testicular transplants on more than 500 goats, rams and bulls, claiming the results showed that implanting organs extracted from young specimens into older animals had a revitalising effect on the latter. He proceeded to convince himself (the world’s elite) that he had discovered a method to slow down the process of ageing.

Thousands of men trusted Voronoff enough to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have monkey glands added to their bodies. This enabled Voronoff to expand his experiments to woman. Read about the monkey gland doctor at Messy Nessy Chic.

Are the aurora borealis visible? If so, and you don't see them often, then you won't want to miss the sight! That's why this hotel phone in Iceland lets you program an option to wake you up. Redditor KristjanHrannar shares this photo of a great feature.

If hotel phones in your town had a button like this, for what event would they wake visitors?

-via Nag on the Lake

Dylan and Wal, both incarcerated in New Zealand for methamphetamine production and related crimes, languished behind prison walls. Inside his cell, Wal watches the TV show The River Cottage, a program about old fashioned cooking. The episode airing is about making yoghurt from scratch. Wal gets excited and invites Dylan to their next racket. Tomorrow, he says, they're going to cook.

What makes humans different from our evolutionary cousins, the great apes? Walking upright and big brains are the top differences. When we think of the evolution of mankind, those two things are often regarded as happening together, but it wasn't quite so. Paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explains that walking upright came first, not because we were smart, but because the trees we lived in died out.

“March of Progress” was an illustration done by a Russian artist, Rudolph Zallinger, in a 1965 Time-Life book called Early Man. It’s this beautiful foldout that shows ancient apes down on all fours, and it has them slowly rising up to modern humans. At the time, with the fossils we had, you could create a narrative like that. But in the last half century we’ve made so many amazing discoveries that show the human family tree is much more diverse. The pace of evolutionary change is quite different and it turns out that upright walking is the earliest of these evolutionary changes. The earliest bipeds on the ground were evolving from things that were upright to begin with in trees. Really all that happened was an ecological change. These hominins were living in environments that had fewer and fewer trees. To continue to get from point A to point B to get your fruit and other food resources, you already are pre-adapted for an upright posture and moving on two legs. In that case, bipedalism wouldn’t be a new locomotion, it’d be an old locomotion. It was just in a new setting on the ground, rather than in trees.

Walking upright put our ancestors into quite a vulnerable position, but it was only later that proto-humans developed large and flexible brains to deal with the situation. Meanwhile, we had to be adaptable and use the environment we had by becoming cooperative and omnivorous. Read how that came about in a fascinating interview with DeSilva at Nautilus.  -via Damn Interesting

Waiting until the last minute is okay, when your team works like a well-oiled clock. While these guys did a wonderful job making this video, I have a few thoughts from experience. There are cups on the floor in the kitchen, but no dishes in the living room? And those cups have no liquid in them? Do these people always use disposable dishes? The only shoes on the floor are in a bedroom? I've never seen a laundry room so free of clothing, and I've never seen anyone vacuum a floor that's already so clean. The lack of dishes with food and liquid is the most nonsensical thing about this scenario- yes, more so than the three vacuum leaners. -Thanks, gwdMaine!

Remember the first time you heard one of your favorite rock songs converted to elevator music by Muzak? You might feel the same way when you hear "Bodies" by Drowning Pool converted to a kid's sing-along. But this isn't being played in kindergartens across the country- it's the latest abomination from Dustin Ballard, the insane genius behind the YouTube account There I Ruined It. -via Laughing Squid 

See also: Animals Sing Drowning Pool

Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) presents a seriously true crime story. Some of the details are a little distracting. In all honesty, you have to feel for the writers who must create pseudonyms for police procedurals that run for twenty years or more- it must be hard to come up with names that don't either repeat or sound completely ridiculous. Beckett-King revealed that his own alias is an anagram: "King Abelard Caketits."

Good news: I have gathered a bunch of photos of naval ship cats in tiny hammocks. Here are sailors of the HMS Hermione in 1941 surrounding their sleeping cat, Convoy. pic.twitter.com/X1iAaezxk5

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) July 2, 2021

Ever since boats became big enough to carry people and their food supplies, there have been cats aboard, mainly to control rodents, but also to boost morale during long voyages. When a crew get attached to a cat, they want to treat their mascot right. During World War II, that meant they should have a hammock to sleep in, just like the sailors. Molly Hodgdon presents a collection of images from that era of ship's cats in their custom-made hammocks. There's no word on whether the cats had to sleep in shifts like the sailors. We can assume they were treated much better than that. See nine such pampered ship's cats at Twitter. -via Everlasting Blort

Bonus: Hodgdon also has a thread of old paintings featuring people spoon-feeding cats.

When you think about alcoholic drinks named after a person, you probably first think of Tom Collins. While that origin story is interesting, Tom Collins wasn't a real person. But plenty of whiskeys, wines, and cocktails took their names from real people, and the stories may surprise you.

Many bartenders argue mixology is a science, and in the case of the Dubonnet, a French aperitif, they’d be right. It's said that chemist Joseph Dubonnet was looking for a palatable way to deliver doses of quinine (found in the cinchona tree) to French Foreign Legionnaires in North Africa in order to fight malaria. But writing in the book Just the Tonic, authors Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt speculate that it’s more likely that he was simply in search for a medicinal tonic in general, not specifically anti-malarial. Either way, in 1846 he came up with the perfect concoction: a blend of fortified wine, herbs, spices, and just the right amount of quinine.

Read the stories of six other alcoholic drinks and the real people behind them at Mental Floss.

The remains of a young man who died in Latvia 5,000 years ago was unearthed in 1875. Scientists have revisited this specimen, called RV 2039, and a few others from the same archaeological dig in order to sequence their genes more than 140 years later, and found quite a surprise among the bacteria that remained in his teeth. It was a very old strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the plague we call Black Death.  

While three of the individuals were clear of disease, they found traces of Y. pestis in the RV 2039 specimen, who was a 20 to 30-year-old man.

The researchers reconstructed the bacterium's genome and compared it to 41 ancient and modern Y. pestis strains.

They found the man had been infected with a strain that was part of a lineage that first emerged around 7,000 years ago, making it the oldest-known strain of Y. pestis.

The ancient strain of Y. pests was not carried by fleas, and wasn't particularly deadly or contagious. But it may well have killed RV 2039, and now it gives scientists a step in the disease's evolution. Read about the discovery and what it means at ABC Science. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin)

Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, which was released in 2002, includes a scene in which Merry and Pippin, who are Hobbits, meet the Ents. In a recent television interview, actor Billy Boyd, who played Pippin, revealed that an early version of the script included both Hobbits getting naked. Screen Rant reports:

Here’s the thing. There was almost nudity in the movies,” said Boyd. “[Screenwriter] Philippa Boyens…she wrote a scene, because we’d been doing some kind of gags and winding people up…[and] she said, ‘Oh, it’s a new scene we’re filming next week, with the Ents. When Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets afraid and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you’re naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ And Pippin says, ‘Hold me, Merry.’

Emphasis added. This certainly would have spiced up the movie.

Strictly speaking, I think that it was a nude scene. The Ents weren't wearing clothes, were they?

-via Dave Barry | Image: New Line Cinema