What’s the weirdest factor you discovered this week? Nicely, no matter it’s, we promise you’ll have a good weirder reply in case you hearken to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Factor I Realized This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and in all places else you hearken to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favourite supply for the strangest science-adjacent details, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Standard Science can muster. When you just like the tales on this publish, we assure you’ll love the present.
FACT: Earlier than people ate chickens, we treasured them as unique pets
By Rachel Feltman
This truth began with an article referred to as “How a delivery error 100 years in the past launched the $30 billion hen trade” by Kenny Torrella at Vox, which is as wild and attention-grabbing because it sounds. However in an effort to not simply crib this one incredible piece of reporting, I made a decision I’d pull a couple of random details from farther again in hen historical past. My thoughts is blown.
It seems that the origin of domesticated chickens is hotly contested. Till lately, it was pretty extensively accepted that folks have been breeding jungle fowl in Asia way back to 10,000 years in the past. There wasn’t any proof of butchering that way back, although, so some recommended the birds have been bred for cockfighting, not for consuming. The oldest indicators of hen bones that folks had slaughtered and snacked on got here from the traditional metropolis of Maresha, which is within the Judean Lowlands and sat on the crossroads of commerce routes for Egypt and Jerusalem through the Iron Age, peaking between 400 and 200 BC.
However in 2022, a world group of researchers referred to as foul. They used radiocarbon relationship to verify the ages of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens present in western Eurasia and north-west Africa. Along with discovering that a variety of bones have been youthful than beforehand thought, the researchers additionally confirmed that these 10,000 yr previous cock combating bones have been truly from pheasants.
Based on the brand new evaluation, the oldest bones of a particular home hen have been present in central Thailand and dated to between 1650 BC and 1250 BC.
Based mostly on the timing, which coincides with the rise of rice and millet cultivation in dry fields in that area, the researchers assume domestication might have began when a couple of jungle fowl have been tempted down from the bushes and into human settlements by the abundance of free grain—kind of like the best way probably the most docile wolves began hanging round human campfires.
However we all know primarily based on the archaeological proof that folks didn’t begin consuming chickens for meat for a whole bunch of years. And based on the brand new examine, as domesticated fowl unfold throughout Asia after which all through the Mediterranean alongside routes utilized by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician maritime merchants, there was a transparent sample of the birds arriving a number of centuries earlier than folks began consuming them.
In early Southeast Asian websites, partial or entire skeletons of grownup chickens have been discovered positioned in human graves. And in Europe, a number of of the earliest chickens, from round 50 BC to 100 AD, have been buried alone or in human graves and present no indicators of getting been butchered. One grave hen even confirmed proof of a healed leg fracture, suggesting somebody cared for it lovingly throughout its life.
The researchers argue that these domesticated jungle fowl would have been among the most colourful and pleasant birds people had ever encountered, making them kind of like pet parrots. So even when cultures didn’t actively revere them, it might have been comprehensible for them to see them as unique and cute and funky to maintain round.
Throughout the rise of the Roman Empire, we all know that eggs turned an especially well-liked snack. It looks as if the widespread adoption of hen meat as a human meals most likely adopted naturally from that trade. In England, chickens weren’t eaten often till round 1,700 years in the past, and that occurred at city and navy websites influenced by Roman occupation.
Quick ahead by means of the delivery error that began all of it and a delightfully weird competitors to breed the absolute best hen, and we come to the trendy poultry trade. It’s… not nice. Right here’s what to search for on labels if you wish to ensure your hen is as ethically raised as attainable.
FACT: Sizing for girls’s clothes is predicated on a complete lot of hooey
By Heather Radke
From the very starting of my e-book analysis, I used to be sure that eugenicists will need to have had one thing to say about butts. They have been, in any case, obsessive about our bodies, and obsessive about placing our bodies in hierarchies. Butts are advanced, fraught symbols and, by the point American eugenics had develop into massively well-liked within the early twentieth century, that they had develop into extensively related to racial categorization and feminine fertility, each main pursuits of the eugenics motion. Regardless of my certainty, although, it took a very long time for me to search out the connection between butts and eugenics. I learn histories of eugenics, talked to archivists, and ultimately interviewed a girl named Kate O’Connor, who was a PhD pupil on the College of Michigan finding out the historical past of sterilization. It was in my interviews with Kate that I discovered about two statues, referred to as Norma and Normman. The statues have been created by a gynecologist and a sculptor and have been meant to be depictions of probably the most regular American man and lady—representations of our bodies, and butts, that have been good of their averageness. In an effort to attain this perfect for Normman, the creators mined military knowledge and have been comparatively simply in a position to create a sculpture of an “peculiar American man.” Norma proved to be a a lot trickier venture. At first it appeared there was no knowledge set that supplied an identical set of statistics for girls that the military knowledge did for males. However then, the sculptor and gynecologist discovered a WPA venture, put collectively by a girl named Ruth O’Brien, that was designed to resolve a century-old drawback: the match of ladies’s garments. O’Brien had been attempting to create standardized sizing for girls’s ready-to-wear garments. She despatched “measuring squads” throughout the USA to measure hundreds of ladies in an effort to design a system of sizes that will match probably the most variety of ladies attainable. The squads took dozens of measurements and famous all of them all the way down to ship again to O’Brien in Washington, with one exception. O’Brien had instructed all of them to throw out knowledge from non-white ladies. Her sizing scheme excluded ladies of shade. For the gynecologist and sculptor, each dedicated eugenicists, this exclusion was a characteristic, not a bug — they have been solely concerned with depicting probably the most regular white ladies. And that’s precisely what they did. They made a sculpture of probably the most regular lady with probably the most regular butt and displayed it within the American Museum of Pure historical past.
FACT: Parrots appear to actually get pleasure from video chatting with different parrots.
By Chelsey B. Coombs
Pet loneliness is a large drawback as a result of people simply can’t be there for his or her animals 24/7. There are over 20.6 million parrots saved as pets within the US, however they typically don’t get sufficient enrichment like they might within the wild with a flock. That may result in destructive behaviors like pacing, extreme sleeping and vocalizations, feather-picking and even self-mutilation.
So scientists at Northeastern College, the MIT Media Lab and the College of Glasgow determined to create and check a parrot-to-parrot video calling system to search out out if that might assist.
Throughout the introductory section, the birds discovered how you can use a bell to ask their caregivers to video chat with different birds utilizing Fb Messenger. In the primary section of the examine, a bunch of birds and homeowners would schedule a three-hour-long window through which they have been all out there to make and obtain calls. Throughout that point, the bell and the telephone or pill would come out, and the parrots might select which of the opposite birds they needed to name.
And it ended up being actually profitable! 100% of the caregiver members mentioned they believed their birds had not less than a reasonably optimistic expertise, and a few birds even discovered new chicken behaviors they’d by no means recognized how you can do earlier than. And whereas all of those calls have been nonetheless facilitated by caregivers, this examine might assist inform new know-how that will let parrots video name their associates every time they needed.