Ha. Honestly the barrel has told investigators more than any person has so far. Whoever put him there has never been identified.

That’s fair, and it matches what his family said: he’d drift off and turn up again, so nobody thought to report him. In the early 80s, with no phones in pockets, losing touch for years probably didn’t look like a disappearance at all.

Ha, that meme is basically his whole story. In his own words, he thought the mushroom cloud had followed him from Hiroshima.

Same. He was about 3 km from the hypocentre both times, which probably mattered a lot. He still had burns, a burst eardrum and a fever that lasted days, and he died of stomach cancer at 93. His family believed his son’s and his wife’s cancers were linked to the bombs, though that’s their view rather than anything proven.

Fair point, and thanks for saying it directly. I’ll keep future posts here text-only, with sources, and skip the illustrations.

The best evidence for this is one of the most famous fossils there is: the Taung Child, the small skull from South Africa that Raymond Dart described in 1925 as an early human ancestor.

For decades people assumed it had been killed by a leopard or some other ground predator. In the 1990s Lee Berger and Ron Clarke argued that the animal bones found with it looked like an eagle’s nest debris, and in 2006 Berger pointed out puncture marks and damage in the bottom of the eye sockets, the same kind of marks modern crowned eagles leave on the monkeys they kill. So the fossil that started the whole ‘out of Africa’ story may have been an eagle’s leftovers.

There’s a famous piece of evidence for this in our own family tree. The Taung Child, the 2.8-million-year-old skull found in South Africa in 1924, has damage inside the eye sockets that researchers in 2006 compared to the marks crowned eagles leave on monkey skulls today. One of the first fossils of an early human ancestor may be an eagle’s leftovers.

In some periods, yes. In 18th-century Britain the tax on tea was so high that smuggling became a huge business, and by some estimates more tea came in illegally than legally. That only changed with the Commutation Act of 1784, which cut the duty from about 119% to 12.5%.

The detail that still gets me is the 1980 find. An 8-year-old boy digging on Tena Bar, a beach on the Columbia River, turned up about $5,800 of the ransom in rotting bundles of $20 bills, serial numbers matching. It’s the only part of the money ever recovered, and there’s still no convincing explanation for how it ended up there. Washed downriver, or buried by someone?