Anthropologists estimate that humans have been around for about 300,000 years. For about 290,000 of those years, there was relative equality in status for everyone. Sure, these small hunter-gatherer groups listened to the wisdom of elders and made allowances for children, but they didn't have chiefs or rulers or wealthy people that bossed the rest around. It didn't take all that long for human society to separate people into the haves and the have-nots, whether we are talking about wealth, power, or status. So what happened?

There are two developments in mobile forager cultures that tend to set the stage for the establishment of inequality. One such scaffold to inequality was the emergence of clan structure. Clans have a strong corporate identity, built around real or mythical genealogical connection, reinforced by demanding initiation rites and intense collective activities. They become central to an individual’s social identity. Individuals see themselves, and are seen by others, primarily through their clan identity. They expect and get social support mostly within their clan, as the anthropologist Raymond C Kelly writes in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). Once storage and farming emerged, incipient elites used clan membership to mobilise social and material support.

The second development was the emergence of a quasi-elite based on the control of information, which created a hierarchy of prestige and esteem, rather than wealth and power. This was originally based on subsistence skills. Forager life depends on very high levels of expertise in navigation, tracking, plant identification, animal behaviour, and artisan skills. The genuinely expert attract deference and respect in return for generously sharing their knowledge, as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues in The Secret of Our Success (2015). As the social anthropologist Jerome Lewis has shown, this economy of information can include story and music, and the same can be true of its ritual and normative life. Indeed, there might be a fusion of ritual with subsistence information, if ritual narratives are used as a vehicle for encoding important but rarely used spatial and navigational information. There’s some suggestion of this fusion in Australian Aboriginal songlines, and the idea is expanded from Australia and defended in detail by the orality scholar Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). So there can be expertise and deference not just in subsistence skills, but also with regards to religion and ritual.

So the elites tended to rise based on who you know or what you know. But none of that would have led to the world we live in if it weren't for one crucial development: agriculture. Read how these forces came together to produce stratified societies at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: David Hawgood)

Whatever you were expecting, this is not it. It's even more surprising. Watch the video before you continue reading. Yeah, it's a glitch, one that hatsuseno explained.

If I had to wager a guess, it's a software encoder with a bug where a b-frame is stuck in a buffer somewhere, the differential is still calculated from an updated one, but the 'stuck' b-frame is getting pushed into the stream. Interesting defect, implies inefficient code too.

And then MagusVulpes translated that into English.

Camera takes two pictures, prepares one while showing the other. The prepared picture is stuck and not taking a new picture, while the shown picture tries to do what it's supposed to.

So, when the camera switches from picture 1 to picture 2, picture 2 forces the background onto the image picture 1 it's trying to show. Kinda like an unintended green screen effect.

The homeowner, oxygn, said that the glitch righted itself when he turned the system off and on again. -via reddit

Circuses featuring trained elephants have been a European tradition for generations, but awareness of how wild animals suffer in captivity has changed the landscape for circus performers. The transition is not simple for an elephant and its keepers who have been together for decades. Such is the case for Dumba the elephant, and the Kludskys, a legacy circus family who has owned her for 41 years. Under pressure from animal rights activists, the Kludskys loaded up their elephant and disappeared -twice.

When Covid-19 broke out across Europe, the Kludskys left a circus in Zaragoza to sit out the pandemic at home. There was no more work but, while Spain was under strict lockdown, at least there was no more scrutiny either. They shielded: Kruse took care of the shopping while George went no further than the nearest farm to fetch Dumba’s hay. Then, in August 2020, Faada changed tack. Instead of focusing on Dumba’s welfare, they turned their attention to the risk Dumba might pose to the public.

The organisation told Spanish authorities that the Kludskys were breaching security regulations. An elephant, being a potentially dangerous animal, had to be enclosed by a thick-barred steel fence. But the local council refused the Kludskys permission to build an unsightly elephant fence in a scenic rural zone. That was the double bind the family found itself in last September. And that’s when they decided that their next act would be to disappear. They stocked up Dumba’s trailer with hay, filled the water tank, loaded her in and heaved up the ramp behind her. Then they nosed the truck slowly out of the gate and travelled north.

The struggle between the Kludskys and animal rights activists over Dumba is a part of the larger story. There is an elephant sanctuary in France, the only one in Europe, eager to take in elderly circus elephants to give them space and companionship in retirement. But it has yet to welcome its first elephant, due to the reluctance of circus people to surrender their animals. Read about Dumba and other circus elephants at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting 

Grant Woolard gave us lovely mashups of classical music in 2016, 2017, and 2019. Now he's back with the fourth in his series of classical music mashups. You didn't know how well diverse composers' music goes together until you've heard Woolard's clever arrangements. This one has 70 musical pieces! Even if you can't name them, you'll recognize them, but if you must know, the top comment at YouTube is a list of them. -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Flickr user Bob Larrick)

The Hobbits of the Shire had charming homes. They were small, to match their inhabitants' dimensions, with round doors and windows, as well as round roofs. They were environmentally-friendly, often built partially underground with grass on top. Kuriositas puts forth the theory that the Hobbits all left the Shire at some point and settled elsewhere around the world, recreating their traditional architecture.

(Image credit: Flickr user William Bereza)

To be sure, many of these homes predate Tolkien's saga, and are presumed to be the inspiration for Hobbit houses. Others are relatively new, inspired by The Lord of the Rings. See a variety of Hobbit houses that stand in countries far and wide at Kuriositas.

A ferry is how you get a car across water if you don't have a bridge. Usually it's a matter-of-fact process: drive your car onto a boat, move across the water, drive your car off the boat. Putting a turntable onto a boat to move cars seems like more trouble than it's worth, but in one place it's a genius solution to a specific set of conditions. That's why Glenelg, Scotland, has the last turntable ferry in the world. -via TYWKIWDBI

People who read the works of contemporary scientists online have probably run into a few archaeologists who were inspired to go into the field by Indiana Jones. I know I have. Real life archaeology turns out to be quite different from the adventures onscreen. Yeah, we've read biographies of quite a few men who were said to be "the inspiration for Indiana Jones," and Harrison Ford's portrayal may have been relatively accurate for the time period, but what went on before and what came after are different worlds.

Forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered to the public on June 12, 1981, the outsized shadow of Indy still looms large over the field he ostensibly represented. Over three movies in the 1980s, plus a prequel television series and a fourth film that came out in 2008, Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., became indelibly tied to American archaeology. Despite it being set in the 1930s, an homage to the popcorn serials of the 1940s, and a cinematic blockbuster of the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still influential to aspiring and veteran archaeologists alike. Even in the 21st century, several outdated myths about archaeological practice have endured thanks to the “Indiana Jones effect.” And contemporary archaeologists, many of whom harbor a love/hate relationship with the films, would like to set the record straight.

Even though the real work is not an Indiana Jones movie, the archaeologists who were inspired by the character enjoy their work, or they wouldn't still be doing it. Read about the work of modern archaeologists and how they compare to the cinematic version at Smithsonian.

YouTuber Creezy designed a "Squirrel Feeding Machine" for squirrels, of course, but he had to defend the loaded Rube Goldberg contraption from other critters. To get it started, he glued nuts to a domino, but then had to wait 14 hours for a squirrel to trip it. What follows is glorious, ending in a bountiful meal for the squirrel, plus a chipmunk, blue jay, and a raccoon. -via Boing Boing

Svend the Viking doesn't want to wear a helmet as he loots and pillages England. It makes his scalp itch and messes up his braids. But Hjalmar knows better. This delicious vignette is from the Danish Road Safety Council. -via Digg

Last week, America commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, in which hundreds of people were killed and the entire Greenwood District of Tulsa was burned to the ground. What is often left out of the story is what happened to Greenwood in the years afterward. The popular notion is that Greenwood never recovered from the riot, which it did, and that the riot occurred on "Black Wall Street," which is a name that was only used after the 1921 massacre.

“They just were not going to be kept down. They were determined not to give up,” recalled Eunice Jackson, a survivor of the massacre, in an interview for Eddie Faye Gates’ 1997 book, They Came Searching. “So they rebuilt Greenwood and it was just wonderful. It became known as The Black Wall Street of America.”

Another survivor, Juanita Alexander Lewis Hopkins, told Gates, “The North Tulsa after the [massacre] was even more impressive than before...That is when Greenwood became known as ‘The Black Wall Street of America.’”

Film footage shot by Reverend Solomon Sir Jones from 1925-1928 shows a bustling, thriving Greenwood, confirming recent data collected by the Tulsa Historical Society showing that a few short years after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood’s homes and businesses came back. It’s difficult to understate the scale of Greenwood’s recovery; unlike other disasters like the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania or San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Greenwood was left to rebuild entirely on its own.

However, the Greenwood neighborhood no longer exists in Tulsa. Read what eventually happened to it at Smithsonian.

The Ford F-150 Lightning is a game-changer for the automobile industry. The company's signature pickup truck can now be powered by electricity, but not only that, you can power your home during emergencies with the truck battery, and you can plug your power tools into it. Ford's chief engineer for this project is Lunda Zhang, who immigrated to the US from China as an eight-year-old who spoke no English.

Outside of the terminal, her father had borrowed a car to drive the three hours from O'Hare to Indiana. The back door opened and Zhang plopped herself down into the seat of an automobile for the very first time.

"That was the first time I was ever in a car and it was just beautiful," Zhang says during an interview with The Drive. "I remember it was dark outside but there were lots of lights from the streets. Everything looked so new and so fascinating. And just to be in a car—it wasn’t even our car, it was a car my dad borrowed to come get us—it was just awesome. I felt like I was riding in a carriage, like the princess story almost."

She quickly became fluent in English, bolstered by popular TV shows like Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street, according to the Detroit Free Press. Soon, Zhang became indoctrinated in American culture. She learned about Coca-Cola and chocolate milk, as well as how the culture iconized automobiles. Specifically, she remembered being drawn to the Batmobile and the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo.

Read how Zhang became an automotive engineer and rose through the ranks to head Ford's electric truck project at The Drive. -via Metafilter

＼混雑状況／
お問い合わせを沢山いただくので、番台に表示を用意しました。
アヒルの数が、その時の客数です。

人力でやってますので実際とは多少ずれがありますし、刻一刻と変化もしますので、目安としてください🙏

時々ツイートでもお知らせします🐥 pic.twitter.com/O2xeQGJitO

— にんじん湯@豊橋 (@ninjinyu2021) May 31, 2021

Before you step naked into a Japanese sento, or public bathhouse, you'd probably like to know how many other naked people you'll be sharing the water with. You often won't know until you step into the bath itself, after passing through the lobby and changing room, although people have developed ways to estimate the crowd. Now, a bathhouse called Ninjinyu in Toyohashi City has unveiled a cute way to know before you undress, even if you don't read Japanese. The picture above shows a display at the front desk, where you can see that there are two ducks in the ladies pool, and six in the men's pool. This means two women and six men currently using the baths. Sora News explains how this helps everyone coming in the door. -via Fark

Our closet primate relatives -and most mammals, for that matter- are covered with fur. How did humans go hairless? And why do we have hair in the few places we do? This TED Ed lesson from Nina G. Jablonski fills us in on what we know and don't know about the way human hair evolved. -via Digg

Internet parodies can be fun, but sometimes they speak truths that are useful in the real world. This poster in the style of a comedy meme is from the National Park Service, which is dead serious about the dangers of getting too close to wildlife. In introducing the chart, PetaPixel has links and videos to numerous stories of tourists who disregarded this advice and found out. -via Nag on the Lake

Part of telling a story on the radio is describing a scene, but that can't be the punch line. It just won't come off right. Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) channels a 1940s radio announcer, Edmund Hillary-Swank, sharing modern internet memes, which doesn't quite have the same impact as seeing them. Bonus: commenters at YouTube have some more examples.

My goodness, there is what appears to be a house fire, in which a dog sits. He proclaims the situation to be fine, despite the calamity. It will not remain fine for much longer, I wager!

Here we have a meme of popular songwriter and entrepreneur Aubrey Drake Graham. In the first image he appears to be uninterested, if not actually offended, by a picture of Rowan Atkinson, but in the second image he is pointing approvingly at an unidentified, bearded ginger.

It’s quite the zoetrope, it appears to be a frog, green in colour, pedalling a unicycle, with the caption, ‘oh gosh, what do we have here?’
 
I beg your pardon, dear listeners, I've just been informed our program is being visited by the Duke of York. My my, I wonder to what we owe such a pleasure. Let me just open the door for him and -- what?? You're not the Duke! I've been bamboozled by Lord Astley yet again!

Blimey! It appears this strapping young fellow has produced a stick, only to insert it into the spokes of the very velocipede upon which he is riding. No mean feat! It is no surprise that he makes a most spectacular fall. Yes, a very peculiar man indeed; he now seems to lay blame on all his surroundings, even though his predicament is no doubt of his own volition.