Links 10 March 2023

Caravaggio, self-portrait

Genetic data on Europe's Paleolithic inhabitants, from 45,000 to 15,000 years ago, show more migrations, more population replacement, and another "ghost" population that has disappeared. The more paleogenetic data we have, the less continuity we can see.

Iron Age comb from Britain turns out to be made of human bone.

Pablo Escobar's hippos are back in the news, because the Colombian government wants to trap 70 of them and send them out of the country. Amusing that they tried to sterilize the hippos with injected birth control drugs but they kept breeding anyway.

Whimsical Stempunk-ish creations by Daniel Agdag.

In Russia, a group of teenage Anime fans calling themselves PMC Ryodan has been brawling with football hooligans and other toughs.

Many undocumented Mexican Americans are retiring back to Mexico after decades in the US, leading a trend of immigrants to el Norte moving south across the border. Other migrants are returning to the Phillipines, Poland, and Korea; over the past few years the number of undocumented migrants leaving the US has about equalled the number entering. (NY Times)

Sometimes ChatGPT just makes things up.

Scott Siskind considers hyperstitious slur cascade, that is, the way a word like Negro can evolve from respectability to derogatory.

One of the main causes of inflation over the past two years has been straight out corporate profiteering.

Britain's oldest shoe is 3,000 years old, sized for a toddler, made of leather.

Collection of remarkable artifacts looted from Cambodian tombs is seized from the estate of a notorious antiquities dealer and returned to Cambodia.

Attempts to date the domestication of the horse have usually relied on study of horses' teeth, to see if they had used a bit. A new study has focused on human skeletons to see if they were modified by horse-riding. It finds that men of the Yamnaya culture, the leading candidate for the source of Europe's Indo-European languages, were riding regularly by 3,000 BC.

People saying predictable things: after someone with a lot of followers posted a video of Spanish colonial architecture in Oaxaca and said she was happy she didn't have to travel to Spain to see it, people went after her for ignoring the dark side of colonialism. The insistence on dwelling on the negative is one of the wearying things about wokeness.

The weird story of a historic black cemetery in Tampa, Florida, which leads the author into the discourse about how black cemeteries are always being forgotten and destroyed. Which is true, but it seems odd to me not to mention that this happens every day to every other kind of cemetery as well.

You probably know that monarch butterflies migrate to certain locations for the winter, a multi-generation endeavor. But I just learned that if you raise a monarch caterpillar in Europe the butterfly tries to cross the Atlantic to get "home." This from a Twitter thread of "sick bug facts" by a woman whose father was an entomologist, who also reports that her father told her mother about monarch migration on their first date. I understand the strategy; I romanced my wife by reciting Beowulf in Old English.

The Berachah Industrial Home for the Redemption of Erring Girls, a bit of Texas history you probably didn't know about.

The NY Times reports that Asian neighborhoods in Brooklyn shifted 24 points toward the Republicans in the 2022 governor's race. That still left them slightly Democratic, and actually the whole city shifted somewhat toward the Republicans, but I consider this a warning that the leftist attack on elite schools and the whole notion of educational excellence will drive Asians and immigrants to the right.

Egyptian archaeologists find a sphinx statue that they think bears the features of the Roman emperor Claudius.

At CPAC, Donald Trump goes hard after the old Republican party, the Marxists, and the Deep State: “I am your warrior, I am your Justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

There has long been a local legend that Leicester Cathedral was built on the site of a Roman temple. Turns out to be true.

Back in October, NASA reported that its DART experiment had changed the course of an asteroid. Now a group of five papers published in Nature backs up the assertion. So the era of planetary defense is here.

Some red state legislators are proposing more generous financial assistance for pregnant women and new mothers, to show that they are really "pro-life" and not just anti-abortion.

"The American political tradition derives from Great Britain, and so, some say, does American English. But the modern American arts took more from France."

Ukraine Links

Kirill Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence: "The decisive battle between Russia and Ukraine will take place this spring and it will be the last before the end of the war."

Short video of a failed Russian assault near Avdiivka.

More T-62 tanks and other old weapons showing up at the Russian front; according to the British MOD, Russia has pulled 800 T-62s out of storage and refurbished them for combat. In Kherson, many of these were simply abandoned by disgusted troops.

Short Twitter post quoting a Russian doctor on the grim conditions at the front: soldiers hunted by drones and getting frostbite and hypothermia along with grenade wounds.

Institute for the Study of War on who is dying in Bakhmut and what the long-term implications of these losses will be.

What does Ukraine want most from its allies? More artillery ammunition. But there just isn't much more to give. The EU has floated a plan to manufacture a million shells, at a cost of around 4 billlion Euros, but the war might be over before the necessary factories come online; one estimate is 28 months. More at the NY Times, which reports that Ukraine's defense minister says they are firing 120,000 shells a month, need at least 250,000, and want 600,000.