Yeah, but these are cops we’re talking about—they’re conditioned to escalate at the first sign of noncompliance.

Can you really picture a cop physically intervening, being pushed aside, and saying “ok, never mind”?

The study authors believe an eruption occurred around 1345, about two years before the start of the pandemic, from either a single volcano or a cluster of volcanoes of unknown location, likely in the tropics. The resulting haze from volcanic ash would have partially blocked sunlight across the Mediterranean region over multiple years, causing temperatures to drop and crops to fail.

Wow, that’s exactly what happened just before the Plague of Justinian (i.e., the volcanic winter of 536). I’m surprised they don’t mention that in the article.

One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?

Even regular laws should have a trial period, and only get confirmed after demonstrating that they have the intended effect.

It looks like the research was done by academic and government-sponsored institutions in Spain and China, so hopefully it won’t just become a profit-making tool for the biotech industry.