In a cave south of Barcelona, archaeologists found a toe bone from an eagle that showed clear evidence of the talon being cut off with a tool. That discovery joined about a dozen other raptors with cut talons found at digs believed to be from Neanderthal settlements. This excavations range from 130,000 to 44,000 years old. They point to the possibility that Neanderthals wore jewelry made of raptor talons.  

"I think it is an important addition to growing body of evidence of personal ornament usage in Neanderthals, now spanning more than 80,000 years," says Davorka Radovčić, a curator at the Croatian Natural History Museum, Zagreb, who studied the talons at Krapina but was not involved in the new study.

Neanderthals lived from Portugal to Eurasia, but their penchant for using raptor claws seems restricted to a specific region of southern Europe, from northern Spain through southern France and northern Italy to Croatia, says the lead author of the new study, Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA), which is based in Madrid. Did wearing talon jewelry have special meaning for Neanderthals living in this geographic area?

"We think that the talons are related to the symbolic world of the Neanderthals," Rodríguez says. While it's difficult or even impossible to know what these symbols actually meant to Neanderthals, their use may imply that Neanderthals were practicing a form of communication.

These artifacts are much too old to have been created by homo sapiens, who arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals wearing ornamentation with no use in survival points to their capability of symbolic thought. Read about the discoveries and what they may mean at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Lou-Octavia Mørch)

Tradition dictates that judges and lawyers (barristers) in London appear in court wearing the kind of powdered wigs that Americans dropped more than 200 years ago. Great Big Story takes us into the tailor shop that makes those wigs. Not only do the particulars need to wear wigs, but those wigs come in different styles for different roles and occasions. At least they don't require powder anymore.

Some people will tell you that they don't want to eat sentient animals. Dietary choices are personal, but it helps if you understand what that really means. How do we know which animals are sentient? Dr. Jonathan Birch is an associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who plans to conduct a series of experiments to test the limits of sentience in lower order animals, such as bees and crabs. Birch has done prior research on the subject and managed to get a 1.5 million euro grant from the European Research Council for these studies. And in order to judge such matters, we must first define what we mean by sentience.

Sentience, as Birch described, is the lowest level of cognition, and the level which Birch hopes to study. Sentience can be described as having a unique point of view. “Sentience is just this term for, basically, consciousness.... there being something like what it feels like to be you. Whether it’s having this experience of a blue sky or the smell of a cup of coffee.”

The next level of cognition is sapience, the ability to have a train of thought and perhaps even form opinions. Finally, the highest level is the concept of self and self-identity.

However, it does appear that the philosophy professor has an agenda.

“I do think that sentience is at the core of what it is for something to have moral status because I think it’s very closely related to something having interests. If crabs are sentient, for example, it’s against the crab’s interests to be dropped in boiling water”. Birch hopes that his research will extend animal welfare protection to invertebrates as well.    

Read more about the experiments at Forbes. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Toni Wöhrl)

Art is hard to define, so the boundaries of art keep expanding in every direction. With so many experimental projects on public display, it's no surprise that occasionally they go bad in a big way. South Korean artist Lee Bul exhibited her work Majestic Splendor at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, and they made her take it down. Why? Because the work consisted of rotting fish and sequins in plastic bags. The smell drove patrons away.  

So not exactly the best start. Undaunted, Lee later brought her fishy opus back to the public's nostrils in 2018 with an appearance at the Hayward Gallery in London, this time with an odor-reducing chemical included in the bags to help mitigate things. There was just one problem: That chemical was volatile, and could explode when mixed with the kind of organic compounds that might come from, say, a piece of rotting fish. Luckily, Lee's artwork didn't involve any dead fi- whoops.

Sure enough, right before the exhibition's return to public glory, a bag of fish exploded while being moved, starting a fire in the gallery. Firefighters were called to put out the blaze, and a security guard required treatment for possibly the grossest kind of smoke inhalation. On the other hand, Bul's exhibition did go off with a bang. We'll see ourselves out.

That's just one of 6 stories of art gone wrong at Cracked. There are not as many deaths as the title might imply, but plenty of injuries and destruction.  

Animator Kevin Parry sliced a lot of cakes to make this stop-motion animation. There's no plot, just a lot of slicing through colorful cakes.

It's CAKE. This took a lot longer to animate than I ever could have imagined. I put so much work into this stop-motion that I am now a professional baker - I am now accepting bookings for your next event.

You can imagine that he may have also gained a pound or two during the process. -via reddit

Thomas Morton was a businessman, not a religious refugee. But he sailed to the Plymouth Colony in 1624 to settle in the New World. Morton didn't see eye-to-eye with the strict, isolationist Puritans, and they saw him as "a dandy and a playboy.” It wasn't long before Morton left Plymouth to start his own community, with like-minded individuals and Native Americans who enjoyed fun, freedom, and fellowship that they couldn't get with the Puritans.

The Puritan authorities didn’t see Merrymount as a free-wheeling annoyance; they saw an existential threat. The problem wasn’t only that Morton was taking goods and commerce away from Plymouth, but that he was giving that business to the Native Americans, including trading guns to the Algonquins. With Plymouth’s monopoly dissolved and its perceived enemies armed, Morton had perhaps done more than anyone else to undermine the Puritan project in Massachusetts. Worse yet, in the words of Plymouth’s governor William Bradford, Morton condoned “dancing and frisking together” with the Native Americans—activities that were banned even without Native American participation. It was basically an early colonial version of Footloose. Governor Bradford nicknamed Morton the “Lord of Misrule,” and it’s not hard to imagine him wearing that title like a crown.

There could be no greater symbol of such misrule than Morton’s maypole. Reaching 80 feet into the air, the structure conjured all the vile, virile vices of Merry England that the Puritans had hoped to leave behind.

The Puritans still held power, so they invaded Merrymount, arrested Morton, and banished him from the colonies. Morton retaliated by writing a three-volume book, New English Canaan, telling exactly what he thought of the Puritans. It was a scandalous expose that Puritans found slanderous. Read about Morton and his book at Atlas Obscura.

(Unrelated image credit: KenL)

I'm sorry, I don't have any dessert to offer you, how about a nice raw hamburger patty? Yeah, it looks straight out of the butcher shop, but they taste just like Rice Krispy treats- because that's what they are. Michel Devon cooked up this food illusion for Halloween, but there's no reason to restrict such a glorious prank to one day of the year! See the process of making these step-by-step in an imgur gallery. They may come in handy at Thanksgiving. -via Boing Boing

Dogs love to ride in a car. This dog may not be knowledgable about infrastructure and highway standards, but he is incredibly aware of where he is and what's going on outside. Every time the car passes under a bridge, he ducks his head! -via Laughing Squid

A while back, we told you how they were going to raise the 11foot8 bridge in Durham, North Carolina. Now we can watch Norfolk Southern and the NC Railroad Company doing it. How do you raise a railroad trestle? They are jacking it up with a dozen hydraulic jacks resting on top of trellises. Really. Just scooch the whole railroad up eight inches, slip some metal shims in the space between the plinths and the bridge, and then set it down. Next, they have to regrade and align the tracks for some distance from the bridge to make it usable to trains. They have some remarkably specialized machinery for those jobs. I guess we'll have to call the this 12foot4 bridge from now on. -via Boing Boing 

First off, we were supposed to learn as little children that you don't eat gum at all. You chew it, and eventually spit it out. But is chewing a 30-year-old piece of gum any safer than eating it? Brian VanHooker collects vintage baseball cards, which often came in a pack of gum. Baseball cards originated as a premium for buying another product, say, cigarettes, or gum for the kids. Eventually, the cards became more prized than the gum, and finally in 1991, Topps removed the gum from its packs of cards. Hooker usually threw away the gum from vintage packs he bought, but occasionally thought of biting into one.

I don’t really know why. While I fondly recall Big League Chew and Bubble Tape as some of the few bright spots in my embarrassingly bad, miserable days in Little League, I have no such regard for the gum I’d find in trading card packs. While I always ate it, I remember it being hard and brittle and the flavor never lasted nearly as long as I’d hoped. It’s like that shitty Bazooka bubble gum, only not as good. But for some reason, as I open up these trading card packs as a 33-year-old man, I’m tempted.

But first, he decided to contact some food safety experts about the idea. Read what he found out at Mel magazine. -via Damn Interesting

The month of November is here, and that bring three totally-foreseen changes to the internet. 1. You see a ton of great Halloween costumes that you cannot use, either as your own costume or for publishing, since Halloween is over, 2. Mariah Carey is singing that Christmas song non-stop, which will continue the rest of the year, and 3. the movie Blade Runner is no longer set in the future. Yes, as the intertitle told us, Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles in November 2019. Back in 1982, when the movie was released, that may have seemed to be far in the future, but here we are.

Blade Runner depicts a November 2019 where mega-corporations rule the world with little resistance from the government and the institutions of civil society have been effectively crushed under their boot heels. Instead of scientific advances that benefit humanity, technological innovations in the world of Blade Runner are channeled into fantastical wastes of resources for the sole benefit of an ever-narrowing class of elites who consider themselves akin to living gods. And people themselves? In Blade Runner, human laborers are almost completely devalued, replaced by hostile, artificially engineered simulacra. This should all sound pretty familiar!

But still no flying cars. Or at least no flying cars that anyone can afford. And what about replicants? Tom McKay believes they already walk among us. See an example at Gizmodo.

There are three types of dingos in Australia: tropical, inland, and alpine, not including dogs that are a mix of dingos and domestic breeds. The alpine dingo is the rarest, and the most threatened. So it's quite surprising to find one in a backyard in Wandiligong, Victoria. The residents who found him just considered him a lost puppy.  

At the time the residents thought the animal may have been a fox or dog, but after looking after the animal for 24 hours they took the pup to the Alpine Animal Hospital.

"He was a puppy when he was brought to us, so about eight to ten weeks [of age]," Veterinarian Dr Bec Day said.

"He had a mark on his back [from what is believed to be an eagle's claws] and there were no other pups nearby. The resident hadn't heard any [other dingos] calling. So he was just a lonely little soul sitting in a backyard.

The pup was named Wandi, after the town, although he should have been named Lucky after surviving a kidnapping by eagle and then the drop to the ground. A DNA test shows that Wandi is a purebred alpine dingo, which makes him valuable to the Australian Dingo Foundation. Wandi has a new home at their sanctuary, where he gets to live among other dingos and will become part of their breeding program. Read Wandi's story at ABC.  -via Metafilter

The golden age of piracy was between 1650 and 1730, when plenty of sailing ships were at sea with valuable cargo to plunder. Most of the pirates listed were executed by gunshot, hanging, or beheading, although one drowned. What's really interesting is the varied stories of their lives, like this guy.

Stede Bonnet owned a large sugar plantation in Barbados. He was a wealthy, married man with children, but the lifestyle did not sit well for him and it was recorded that his marriage was rather loveless.

In 1717, Bonnet bought a 10-gun sloop, instead of stealing one like most pirates, and manned his ship. He had no experience at sea, but he was determined to become a pirate. Historians today joke that Bonnet was going through some sort of midlife crisis at this point, but some historians believe he was mentally unbalanced.

His crew did not respect him and eventually they abandoned him to join the crew on Blackbeard’s ship. Bonnet was allowed to remain on Blackbeard’s ship as a guest until he returned to piracy in July 1718. By September, Bonnet was arrested for piracy and transported to Charleston, South Carolina where he was hung at White Point Garden on December 10, 1718.

Read of the lives and deaths of nine other pirates at Strange Ago.  -via Strange Company

We eat chickens, ducks, pigeons, geese, and turkeys. But we don't eat swans. In fact, mention eating a swan and people will look at you like you've lost your mind. Swans aren't all that different from the birds we eat. In fact, once upon a time it was normal to cook and eat swan.

According to food historian Ivan Day, it has not always been frowned upon to eat our long-necked feathered friends. A harrowing recipe from the Victorian Handbook for Housewives recommended not only eating swan, but fattening up cygnets from birth to be consumed as teenagers. “This splendid dish, worthy of a prince's table, [is] a capital and magnificent Christmas dish,” the 1870 journal claims. The recipe suggests removing cygnets from their parents, fattening them up with grass and barley, then roasting them on a spit, garnished with turnips decoratively carved into tiny swans. A 1300 French cookbook, Le Viandier, includes a recipe for roast swan, while a 1685 cookbook used in 17th century England and colonial era America recommends a “swan pye” as a course in a festive banquet.

So why do people feel so strongly that eating swan is wrong today? That's a story that begins with historical facts and moves to feelings over time, which you can read at The Outline.   

(Image credit: Arpingstone)

Get ready for something truly ridiculous. Sean Patrick Daigle has a tradition of doing a couple's costume for Halloween every year. With his pug. This year, they tackled Beauty and the Beast. You may be really impressed by the setting, as I was. He explained that they went to the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and shot the whole thing in six minutes on an iPhone while security was busy trying to remove them from the premises. -via reddit