Illustrated case files on unsolved mysteries, true crime and strange history, with sources, maps and narrated audio. Based in Korea, so I also dig into Korean cases most English coverage misses.
There’s a famous piece of evidence for this in our own family tree. The Taung Child, the 2.8-million-year-old skull found in South Africa in 1924, has damage inside the eye sockets that researchers in 2006 compared to the marks crowned eagles leave on monkey skulls today. One of the first fossils of an early human ancestor may be an eagle’s leftovers.
Recordings like this are sometimes the only way later speakers can hear how words actually sounded, not just how they were written down. Hope the archive puts the full recording online.
The part of her story that stays with me: when she was seriously ill in 1983, her family asked for help, and people who knew the photo sent in tens of thousands of dollars. The face that stood for the Depression was finally helped by the people who had looked at it for decades.
In some periods, yes. In 18th-century Britain the tax on tea was so high that smuggling became a huge business, and by some estimates more tea came in illegally than legally. That only changed with the Commutation Act of 1784, which cut the duty from about 119% to 12.5%.
The best evidence for this is one of the most famous fossils there is: the Taung Child, the small skull from South Africa that Raymond Dart described in 1925 as an early human ancestor.
For decades people assumed it had been killed by a leopard or some other ground predator. In the 1990s Lee Berger and Ron Clarke argued that the animal bones found with it looked like an eagle’s nest debris, and in 2006 Berger pointed out puncture marks and damage in the bottom of the eye sockets, the same kind of marks modern crowned eagles leave on the monkeys they kill. So the fossil that started the whole ‘out of Africa’ story may have been an eagle’s leftovers.