Pictures of People Dressing Up as a Mummified Girl from the Nordic Bronze Age

The remains of a teenage girl from the Nordic Bronze Age were discovered near Egtved, Denmark in 1921, and nicknamed "Egtved Girl". 

A google image search revealed that, for some reason, lots of people have dressed up as her over the years. Here are some of them.

New Evidence on the History and Ancestry of Europeans

New DNA evidence for a large-scale Bronze Age migration of the Yamnaya people from southern Russia into Central and Northern Europe. They brought with them genes for lactose tolerance and innovations in material culture.

This evidence also bears on the debate about the early spread of Indo-European languages. Some say it shows that Indo-European languages spread from the Russian steppes to Europe, but another possibility is that there were two waves and two routes of transmission: one from the Near East, through Anatolia, and another via the southern Russian steppe.

Genetic Clustering in the U.K.

A recent gene study of native Britons shows, among other things, that Celtic Britons do not have a common ancestry.

Britons in the "Celtic fringe" of the West Country, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland can be divided into half a dozen or more distinct genetic clusters. They don't show a common genetic profile compared to other Britons from England. The current genetic clustering of native Britons thus predates the arrival of the Celts. The clustering also shows that Angles and Saxons intermarried with the native Britons they encountered, rather than replacing them when they arrived in the island in and around the 5th century CE.

This is a fairly common pattern throughout history; compare the Aryan migration into southern Asia, and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. In both cases, there was a transfer of language and culture (by the Indo-Aryans and Spanish, respectively), without a wholesale replacement of the native population.

This type of study could potentially answer many historical questions about population movements; I hope similar studies are performed all around the world.

Dialogue between Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

This is a fascinating, thought-provoking dialogue about the future of humanity, but it's heavy on speculation, and light on evidence. 

For example, here is Yuval Noah Harari speculating about a future in which advances in technology have rendered most humans worthless as workers:

Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

Harari makes a lot of assumptions. The fundamental assumption is that many or most people will not find ways to make their labor a useful complement to the labor of machines and computers.

This assumption is present in most discussions about Our Robotic Future, or Our Future after the Singularity. And for all I know it may be true. But surely it isn't the only possible scenario. By analogy, the Industrial Revolution didn't render manual laborers obsolete--it just required them to gain the skills necessary for working with machines in factories.

Now, there's certainly no guarantee that many or most workers will be able to gain the skills necessary to make their labor valuable in Our Robotic Future. And Tyler Cowen and other economists have presented evidence that income inequality is currently on the rise precisely because only some workers have managed to gain the skills and training necessary to make their labor a useful complement to the labor of computers. But I don't see a discussion of this or other evidence by Harari and Kahneman, which makes most of their comments pretty speculative.

The Witches of Chiloe

This article tells the tale of a secret society of witches and warlocks which apparently operated in the late 19th-century in the island of Chiloe, Chile. Most of the evidence discussed by the article is suspect testimony from a trial in which many of the members of the society were charged with a variety of crimes (including murder).

Author Mike Dash argues that the secret society of witches was quite real (despite the superstitious exaggerations surrounding their activities), and that they appear to have combined the religious and magical practices of the island's indigenous shamans (the Mapuche Machis) with covert political activity aimed at resisting the authority of the central government in Santiago and establishing an alternative local shadow-government in Chiloe. According to the testimony of some of the witnesses in the trial, the secret society appears to have taken a turn to the dark side of shamanism (sorcery or witchcraft) as a result of internal political disputes.

Here are some pictures of the beautiful Isla Grande de Chiloe.

Addendum (3/1/15): And here are some pictures of the "calendar" designs used by Machis (shamans) on their drums.

The Lost World of London's Original Coffee House Culture

Historian David Greene has written a delightful survey of London's coffee house culture in the 17th and 18th centuries. (Shorter version here.)

This post could also have been aptly titled "Alternate Careers for PhD's"; Dr. Greene's day works by day as a leader of historically themed walking tours through the City of London.

Secrets of Charred Ancient Scrolls Revealed?

A new x-ray technique might enable scholars to read hundreds of lost philosophy texts which survive only in scrolls blackened by the ancient eruption of Mt. Veusvius.

The scrolls are believed to mostly contain writings by a follower of Epicurus named Philodemus. This could prove very significant to our understanding of the history of philosophy; while several works of Epicurus have survived, including some which summarize his teachings, most of Epicurus' numerous and lengthy works have been lost, and Philodemus' writings may contain additional information about their contents and the characteristic doctrines of the school.

Martin Luther King, Jr's Role in Ending the Poll Tax

Writing for The Daily Beast, Gary May gives a long-form account of the part played by MLK in the congressional battles over ending the poll tax in 1965. May explains how the poll tax was used as part of a strategy to disenfranchise southern blacks de facto, even if they had the right to vote de jure. He also argues that ending the poll tax had a large beneficial impact on poor whites in the four southern states which continued to collect poll taxes at that time.