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12 stories
Baseball built a statistic to measure individual value. Somewhere along the way we started asking it to explain winning, greatness and championships. Those may not be the same thing.
Capuchins, chimpanzees and macaques are using tools, passing down traditions and leaving archaeological records behind. What does that tell us about the origins of human intelligence?
Tools, fire, language and culture did not arrive together, and none of them is unique to us. The interesting part is the accumulation.
Three piles, kept separate: the record that exists, the questions nobody can close yet, and the arguments people build on top of both.
Astronomy measures the cosmos with absurd precision, then admits roughly 95% of it is something we have never directly detected.
Every time humans send hardware somewhere new, the prevailing model survives about as long as the first data downlink.
An artifact is data. Its meaning is an argument — and archaeology is mostly the discipline of keeping those two things apart.
Monumental construction predates agriculture at some sites. That single fact broke a very tidy story about how civilization began.
Humans revise their stories constantly. Sediment does not, which is exactly why geology keeps ruining comfortable timelines.
The planet is not scenery for human history — it is a machine that feeds, buries and occasionally resets everything living on it.
The evidence describes a branching, messy bush of relatives, most of which are dead. We are a surviving twig, not a summit.
Whatever you believe about UFOs, the standard of evidence should be the same as it is anywhere else.