History
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Paleolithic signs: I’d love for us to discover a stone age writing system, but this is not it
Writing is one of humanity’s best inventions. Unlike speech, it allows the transmission of ideas over generations with little degradation. You, in the year 2026,…
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Do Composers Die Young? Yes, they have shorter life expectancy
Last February, I asked different AIs (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek) to investigate if composers have historically died younger than other professions. Two of them couldn’t answer…
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The Potato Order: A royal decree that required reverse psychology to implement
Europeans were initially skeptical of potatoes, which originated from America. Farmers had to be forced to grow them and taught how to eat them. Potatoes…
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An Old and Wild Absurdity: We keep making the wrong assumptions about evolution
Some ways of thinking about evolution and natural history don’t go away, no matter how forcefully they get refuted. In my dentist’s waiting room earlier…
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Tastefully Painted Statues: In antiquity, they had taste after all
This is a thorough debunking of the claim that the ancient Romans and Greeks painted their statues in garish colors. Also, do yourself a favor…
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Plumbing, and Lack Thereof: Our ancestors’ sanitary arrangements were objectionable
If we invent a time machine, I predict that we’ll get temporal tourists returning from the past, horrified about how people used to do their…
Nehaveigur 