The following amusement is from a few years ago.

Given the recent conviction of GOP House member George Santos (NY) to more than seven years in jail for wire fraud and identity theft, plus the sentencing of Democrat Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife for bribery and conspiracy I’d say it still stacks up pretty well.

In the movie The Untouchables, Elliot Ness’s character responds to a bribe offer by telling the Chicago politician that in Roman times such people were sewed into a bag with a wild animal and then dumped in a river.

Research reveals first skeletal evidence of gladiator bitten by lion in Roman period. And found in Britain, not Italy!!

It’s possible that the gladiator survived the lion attack, because humans are sometimes quite tough:

Researchers uncovered evidence that our ancestors survived a population crash that lasted over 100,000 years, leaving just around 1,280 individuals. This severe bottleneck occurred roughly between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, profoundly influencing the genetic makeup of today’s humans.

We come from that small a number? I’d read about massive human population declines during the Younger Dryas period, but that was in Europe and only 12,000 years ago. This is far more dramatic.

How it’s been discovered is also quite a cool story because the way the scientists did it was not via ancient DNA from bones, since even that DNA deteriorates over time, making the samples scarce or impossible to analyse.

Instead they developed a new method called FitCoal (Fast infinitesimal time Coalescent process) which used a computer database to analyse modern DNA across some 3000 people spread around among 50 different populations around the world today, looking for connections between their DNA for genetic variations known as alleles. The distribution of those today gives clues about past human population sizes.

Although the article doesn’t say I assume that they’ve calibrated it by running it back through time periods where fairly accurate population sizes are known, possibly as long ago as three thousand years when civilisation began to demand some degree of accuracy in such counts?

The result, as dramatic as it is, also gains support because it explains other findings that have mystified scientists in this field for decades:

Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the study, explained, “The gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age. Chronologically, it coincides with significant loss of fossil evidence.”

As to what caused it, the jury is still out but it’ll likely come down to …. Climate Change.

Since then of course humans have flourished, no greater than today, but 99% of species on Earth have gone extinct so we can’t think ourselves too special, even as our big brains enable us to adapt faster and more effectively to changes on Earth, or change the environment to suit us. Even so, tribes, civilisations and cultures have gone extinct, and are still doing so:

The Presbyterian World Mission is laying off 54 of its 60 missionaries and is assigning 30 office staff to serve as “global ecumenical advisors” in the new organization… The PCUSA has seen a drop of over 10% in membership between 2020 and 2023, and the ensuing drop in tithes and offerings necessitated the change, in part. Other concerns include missionaries serving in dangerous areas.

As I pointed out the other day in the post on Pope Francis, mainline Protestant groups have declined badly in the West where they started, and the end of missionary work outside the West for this group is just another example of that. Besides, what the hell were they preaching nowadays?

Oh… Right:

Well, one of the things that is also sent here is the signal that there was a retreat from conversionist missions long ago. Among theological liberals, conversionism became an embarrassment, and the expansion of Christianity became a form of imperialism, of imperialist imposition, that was itself an embarrassment.
…
And over time, all of them have succumbed to liberalism. All of them have been taken over basically by those with a liberal agenda. And this means anti-supernaturalism. It doesn’t just mean dropping the belief in the virgin birth. It means a total reformulation of Christian theology. Exactly what figures such as [Presbyterian scholar] Gresham Machen warned back in the 1920s would happen.

You can’t proselytize what you don’t believe in, and if you don’t believe in what used to be the core of your religion what’s the point in hanging around any longer, let alone joining it?