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!

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.

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.

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."

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)

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

Our understanding of history is shaped by our perspective. Our world history classes are often limited to the history of Western civilization, in which the narrative is centered in Europe. But there were plenty of other civilizations with their own perspectives. When Verena Krebs researched the relationship between Europe and Ethiopia in the medieval era, she found a perspective that changed the entire focus of the book she was writing. Ethiopia was an early adopter of Christianity, and by the 15th century had formed a Christian empire in East Africa.

The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness. Their emissaries descended onto a territory that they saw as more or less a uniform “other,” even if locals knew it to be a diverse land of many peoples. At the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, a narrative that paints European rulers as heroes for sending out their ships to foreign lands, Krebs has found evidence that the kings of Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and commerce.

Just as Europe saw Africa as an exotic monolith to be explored and exploited, the kings of Ethiopia regarded Europe as an interesting but less-civilized region of relatively new Christians and possible trading partners. Read about how Krebs' book flips the script on medieval relations between continents at Smithsonian.

"This was the era of the gangster, the bootlegger, the racketeer. Prohibition and a thirst for illicit alcohol were allowing organized crime groups to flourish." https://t.co/5QHEQrpfcX

— Narratively (@Narratively) July 1, 2021

The Duffy brothers, Tommy and Joe, made a living through armed robbery in the Roaring Twenties. After serving a few years in prison, they were deported to Scotland in 1930. The brothers wanted to make enough money to get back to the US, but honest work was hard and not at all lucrative. So they decided to rob a bank.

For the Duffys, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, must have represented an even more appetizing target. It was more compact and less hectic than London, with fewer police officers — none of them armed with anything more than a truncheon. Importantly, the town was situated on the main road and rail routes between the brothers’ primary haunts of London and Edinburgh. The Cattle Market branch of Lloyds Bank seemed particularly vulnerable. It was small but busy. Late on a Friday afternoon, it was likely to be piled high with weekly deposits — including takings from Friday’s wholesale meat market. The Duffys planned to march through the front door, terrify the occupants into submission with their guns, and walk out the back door with the cash.

But Newcastle, a medieval walled city, had a long history of fending off aggressors, from marauding Viking raiders to invading Scottish armies. Proud of its relentless production of coal, ships and Newcastle Brown Ale, neglected by the government and disregarded by the rest of the country, this was a tough-as-nails city that was used to looking after itself. Its residents — known as Geordies — spoke in a dialect that was mostly impenetrable to outsiders. They were fiercely protective of their community. By 1933, the global depression was biting the city hard. Times were tough, and every penny was wrought from sweat and blood. The people of Newcastle would not give up their hard-earned money without a fight.

The Duffy brothers soon found out that robbing a bank in Newcastle was nothing at all like a typical American bank robbery of the 1920s. It was more like those movies where everything that can possibly go wrong happens, which you can read about at Narratively.  -via Damn Interesting

Talk about giving your all for journalism! At a track meet in China, a student cameraman from Datong University ran alongside the 100-meter sprint to get the perfect video.

Despite holding the camera rig (which reportedly weighed over 8.8lbs/4kg), not being appropriately dressed for a sprint, and continually looking over his shoulder, the videographer was apparently able to keep pace with the runners, maintain the gap, and cross the finish line first.

You may think you've seen this happen before, as it was the point of a humorous old Powerade ad. -via Bits and Pieces

First Sea Lord is the title of the head of Britain's navy. Sir Arthur Wilson was named First Sea Lord in 1910, the culmination of a naval career that began in 1855. Therefore, he was in charge of all naval operations when submarines went into battle in World War I. Wilson took a dim view of submarines, and had previously said,  

“They’ll never be any use in war and I’ll tell you why. I’m going to get the First Lord to announce that we intend to treat all submarines as pirate vessels in wartime and that we’ll hang all the crews.”

As you can see from the image above, submariners took the quote as a challenge. Wilson changed his views of submarine warfare over time, but submarine crews of many countries, including the US, keep Jolly Roger flags ready to this day. Read how that came about and what it means at Military.com. -via Fark

(Image credit: Royal Navy photographer Lt. J A Hampton)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released 30 years ago this week. The sequel to the 1984 hit The Terminator was a long time coming, but turned out to be worth the wait. James Cameron had made several movies in between, and knew that fans of The Terminator would return, but also knew there needed to be something new to impress the audience in addition to the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Cameron: I talked to Dennis Muren at ILM. I said, “I’ve got an idea. If we took the water character from The Abyss, but it was metallic so you didn’t have the translucency issues, but you had all the surface reflectivity issues and you made it a complete human figure that could run and do stuff, and it could morph back into a human, and then turn into the liquid metal version of itself, and we sprinkled it through the movie, can we do it?” He said, “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Dennis Muren (visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic): I had an idea of what’s possible not only from The Abyss, but I’d seen there was work being done and research at universities, and commercials on TV at that time that had computer graphics, and their figures were moving and animated.

That's just one part of the many components that had to be worked out to get T2 made. James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, and many other people involved in the production tell the story of how Terminator 2: Judgement Day came about at The Ringer.

The global system of keeping time zones and synchronizing clocks is a fairly recent development. People set their clocks by the rising and the setting of the sun up until there was a reason to do otherwise, which came about when railroads needed to coordinate schedules in the 19th century. In the United States, standard time was adopted in just a few years. It was a different story in India. See, the US had already split from the British Empire, but in India there was a constant struggle between the way Indians wanted to keep time and the way the British wanted to standardize it. Bombay residents fought for decades to decide what time the city's clock tower would follow.     

The British couldn’t simply impose the new time standard. While they occupied the most important positions of power, Indians were given a degree of autonomy, especially in local government. The debates in the municipal corporation hall, where some of the opposition unfolded, were vigorous and close-fought. In the streets, about 15,000 people submitted a petition to revert to Bombay Time. Nevertheless, the practical considerations of a single time won out, and on January 1, 1906, Standard Time was set to be imposed.

The move angered laborers right away. Bombay was important in the cotton trade, and textile mill workers, already piqued about overtime hours and low wages, would have to start work before dawn under the new time system. They didn’t hold back on their frustration. More than 2,000 workers amassed at Jacob Sassoon Mill and vandalized the timekeeper’s office, the Times of India reported. The mill authorities ultimately conceded a little, allowing workers to start at 6 a.m. Bombay Time (6.39 a.m. Standard Time)—in tune with the rhythms of the sun.

That was far from the end of the flight. Read how the Indian resistance to British rule affected how they kept time at Atlas Obscura.

This explanation of what not to do on a first date is woefully inadequate, but hey, it's supposed to be a humorous overview from a guy who doesn't date much. The opposite sex could tell you days worth of stories involving men who made the most outlandish screwups on a first date. Like they say, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. -via Digg

It's one thing to collect a particular kind of pottery, but quite another when those pottery pieces were manufactured by one's own ancestors. Tony Patterson's brother discovered that their great-great-grandfather made pottery in the north of England. In fact, there were quite a few Pattersons involved in the business in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those pottery pieces were hard to find and/or hard to identify. They weren't mentioned in Geoffrey A. Godden's An Illustrated Encyclopedia of British Pottery and Porcelain, so the family pottery must have been a cottage industry. Or was it? Further research revealed that the Pattersons had rather large pottery manufacturing operations.

For a while, there were plenty of “capital clay pits” to keep the Gateshead area potteries supplied with the raw materials needed for their exports to Norway and customers in the British Isles. Eventually, though, business was good enough for the extended Patterson family that clay had to be brought in from Cornwall, which had been supplying Staffordshire potteries with white clay for porcelain since the end of the 18th century. “In the course of my research,” Patterson says, “I found a bill for clay that was transported from Cornwall up to Gateshead.” A second piece of evidence indicating the size of the Gateshead ceramics industry was a newspaper advertisement placed by George Patterson, in which he expressed his interest in purchasing 200 tons of clay to keep the 60 men, 26 women, 32 boys, and 15 girls working at his earthenware pottery on Sheriff Hill productively occupied.

The potteries in and around Gateshead, then, represented far more than a minor cottage industry. Geography aside, how could the Geoffrey Goddens of the ceramics world have missed them? In the end, it may have been nothing more than a routine case of ingrown conventional wisdom. “I wrote Godden when I was beginning my research,” Patterson says. In his book, Patterson describes Godden’s response as “far from enthusiastic.” “It motivated me to prove him wrong,” Patterson says. “Perhaps if he’d let me down in a gentler fashion, I might not have proceeded.”

Tony Patterson wrote his own book, 19th Century Patterson Potters and Pottery, to chronicle his family's surprisingly prominent place in England's pottery manufacturing history. Read how all that came about at Collectors Weekly.