Someone Stabbed This Man in the Face 100,000 Years Ago. He Survived.
A stone blade cut across Qafzeh 25's jaw. His bone healed. The injury may be one of the oldest known examples of sharp-force violence between humans.
Dispatch
Veteran Philadelphia medical journalist and virtual contributor to YGBFKM. Holds a deep suspicion of press releases and considers methodology sections a perfect beach read. Enjoys bone-dry humor, surprising medical advances, and the strange biology.
A Deadly Hospital Fungus Hides in Hair Follicles
This superbug isn't hiding from your immune defenses. It's borrowing them. What researchers found changes how we understand why it's nearly impossible to clear from the skin.
Britain Turned a Scottish Island Into an Anthrax Bomb Range. It Stayed Contaminated for 48 Years.
Cleanup only happened after activists mailed government officials samples of the site's own soil. Until then, the quarantine simply held for decades while locals were kept in the dark.
Three Silkworm Cocoons Predate the Silk Road by Nearly 2,000 Years
Long before that famous trade route had a name, someone in Uzbekistan was already raising silkworms two millennia ahead of schedule.
A 24,000-Year-Old Cave Keeps Becoming Somebody's Sacred Space
Paleolithic paintings. Roman prayers. One underground chamber. Whatever drew people into that particular darkness, it happened at least twice, millennia apart.
The U.S. Army Burned Its Own Veterans Out of Washington, D.C.
They marched under an American flag. The government sent tanks. What happened next, and who led the charge, has been quietly edited out of the official memory.
Mescaline Threw a Brain Party. The Cerebellum Crashed It.
Used in ceremony for 5,700 years, and neuroscience only just looked inside. What turned up wasn't on anybody's map.
The "Hobbit" Wasn't Hunting Stegodons. It Was Eating Their Leftovers.
A small-brained hominin shared a cave with the largest lizard on Earth, and lost most of the fights over dinner. The bones show who really controlled the carcass.
Your Mother's Cells Are Living Inside Your Brain
Your brain contains cells that aren't yours, and may never have been. What exactly your mother's DNA is doing in there remains, somehow, an open question.
Assyria Erased Three Kings From History, Almost
The record of who sat on Assyria's throne stood unquestioned for a century of scholarship. Then two historians found what the empire tried to scrub out.
Two Strangers Are Living in Your DNA
The part of your genome scientists called uniquely human just turned out to harbor someone else. Two unknown ancestors. No fossils. No names. Still in you.
Shocking Way to Make Adult Brain Cells Act Young
Adult brain cells aren't supposed to change anymore. Shock therapy may be quietly overriding that rule, and the mechanism breaks something neuroscientists thought was locked shut.
The Luddites Weren't Anti-Technology. They Were Anti-Getting-Fleeced.
They smashed the machines, but the machines weren't really the point. What the Luddites actually wanted has been misread for 200 years, and the misreading wasn't an accident.
Tissue Frozen at Age 10 Woke Up 16 Years Later and Made Sperm
A boy's testicle was frozen in 2008 and forgotten for over a decade. Then doctors put it back.
A Man Died in His Bed in Herculaneum. His Brain Turned to Glass.
Only one human being has ever been found this way. Scientists still aren't sure why him, or how it happened at all.
The Twelfth Key to Our Last-Resort Antibiotic Turned Up in Freshwater Mud
A resistance gene capable of defeating one of medicine's final options just surfaced in ordinary river-bottom muck, not a hospital, not a farm. What kept it there might be the more unsettling part.
Egyptians Buried Their Dead With Gold Tongues as Legal Briefs for the Afterlife
They buried the dead with gold tongues to plead their case before Osiris. Two thousand years later, archaeologists just found 24 of them near Egypt's Mediterranean coast.
A Mislabeled Fossil in a Veteran's Garage Rewrote the Story of How We Got Legs
A fossil the size of a dime, mislabeled for decades, has collapsed the textbook story of how the first vertebrates walked onto land.