🐈 10 things I learned last week (Issue 008)
Hey folks! This week in Hypertextual: Neanderthal spears, dancing bees, and why car seats may have prevented 145,000 births. Plus, AI coding, ancient cats, and smartphones against dementia.
Domestic cats likely came from Tunisia and reached Europe during the early first millennium BCE. New waves followed in the Roman, Late Antique, and Viking periods—each bringing distinct genetic traces and contributing to the decline of native European wildcats.
About 80 per cent of the code behind Claude Code, an AI programming assistant, was written by Claude itself.
Ancient Greek musicians aimed for perfect tuning, but singers and lyre players had to adjust, bending notes slightly to make melodies work. Think of a lyre string tuned to a perfect note, then nudged by a finger to match a singer’s pitch. It’s a bit like early Greek atom theory, where atoms sometimes had to “deviate” to explain real-world motion.
Older adults over 50 who use computers or smartphones have a 58% lower risk of cognitive impairment, according to a study of over 400,000 people.
The world’s oldest wooden spears are 200,000 years old—100,000 years younger than once thought—and were used by Neanderthals, not their ancestors.
The oldest spear tip ever found in Europe was discovered in the North Caucasus—carved from bison bone by Neanderthals up to 80,000 years ago, long before modern humans arrived.
Despite an average of 12.4 years of schooling—on par with Western Europe—Russia has shockingly low life expectancy. In 2010, a 15-year-old in Russia could expect to live 14 years less than one in Australia, despite similar education levels. By 2019, Russian male life expectancy at 15 matched that of Haiti, and trailed half the world’s least developed countries.
From 2007 to 2018, British Bangladeshi and Black African pupils caught up with or outperformed White British peers in reading and maths. Indian and Chinese pupils pulled further ahead. In maths, more top scorers were from mixed and non-White backgrounds.
Car seat laws may have saved 57 lives in 2017, but they also led to 8,000 fewer U.S. births that year. Since 1980, stricter rules have prevented an estimated 145,000 births, largely because families can’t fit three child seats in one car.
Young honey bees learn to waggle dance by watching older bees. Without this guidance, they make lasting errors, especially when encoding distance.
What I’ve been reading
The global and shockingly sustainable lives of wine barrels: “We think of barrels as teabags. It gets used first for bourbon, like the first steep of a teabag. You get a lot of colour and flavour from the barrel quickly. If you use the barrel again, it’ll take longer to impart, so maybe it’s used for scotch, which sits and ages longer. You mute the barrel’s flavours along the way.”
The fakelore of food origins: “Throughout history, claims for how new dishes were introduced range from the reasonably plausible to the absolutely impossible. Generally, most new dishes are not invented; they evolve.”
What the ancient bog bodies knew: “Most of the bog mummies that have turned up show signs of multiple traumatic injuries and are presumed to be murder victims. Of the 57 bog people whose cause of death could be determined, at least 45 met violent ends, and quite a few were bludgeoned or suffered mutilation and dismemberment before they died.”
From the archives
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Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)
Illustration: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.