Snippets—Oldest built structure, one week to Menewood, the great vax hunt, more

Menewood is out in exactly one week. I’ve been happily making little quote tiles like the ones above. (I’ve made more than this but those reviews are embargoed so I can’t use them yet.) I’m also pondering the shape of my only solo presentation in Bellingham. I think I might for the first time use slides because all through the Menewood process I’ve been making images—maps, banners and shields, animals—and it might be fun to share. Check my Events page for dates/times/venues. And remember, there’s still time to pre-order!Archaeologists working in Kalambo Falls, Zambia, have unearthed evidence of wood-working and a shaped-wood structure that is almost half a million years ago. This is the oldest built structure in the world. It predates Homo sapiens by at least 100,000 years (and possibly more). Who built them—what variety of our genus? What are the structures exactly? (My guess: some kind of causeway or platform raised out of the water.) You can read the entire paper published in Nature, “Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago,” by L. Barham et al. What blows my mind is how much we still don’t know, how amazing the world keeps turning out to be. How many signs of civilisation on our own planet have we missed? Would we recognise something not naturally occurring from, say, the Jurassic or Cretaceous? What marks of our own civilisation will still be recognisable in half a million years? Right now probably only those structures carved from rock—but only the hardest rock. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.And speaking of still figuring things out, a couple of months ago the Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper on giant sloth bones in central Brazil. But they weren’t just any old sloth bones—these were bones that had been intentionally modified. Not only that, but modified some time during th late glacial maximum, which was 19 to 26 ka BP (that is, 19,000 – 26,000 years before the present). In other words, it’s pretty good evidence of people in South America well before most people thought it possible. (The date keeps creeping. It used to be that the earliest evidence of people in the Americas was dated to the Clovis people of about 13,500. Then there have been a few bits of burnt stuff that stretched it to 16,000 years. The possibility of 26,000? A big jump. There again, I’m still willing to bet that before I die there’ll be evidence of humans in the Americas at least 40,000 years ago and I wouldn’t be shocked by 50,000.Yesterday, after a four day hunt—phones and emails and chatbots and websites, that is, endless phone loops, crashed sites, contradictory information—I finally tracked down and kept an appointment to get my XBB vaccination. I always have mixed feelings about these shots. There’s no question that I need one—last time I checked the stats, a person with MS who uses a wheelchair was 24 times more likely to die of Covid than a mobile, non-Ms person. But these shots fuck me up. A lot. The first 30 hours are truly dreadful: I become incapable (seriously, there’s an 8-hour period when I can’t even turn over in bed unless Kelley helps); I’m in a lot of pain; and on really lucky occasions I get a week of basilar migraines (the kind where I go blind and aphasic—so much fun!). So I dread the shot, every time. And every time I go get it. And I’m glad I didn’t out it off: as she threw the syringe into the sharps box, the pharmacist told me that was the last dose, and she’s not sure when the next batch arrives. I’m typing this Monday evening and scheduling for Tuesday because by the time you’re reading this I will less capable of civilised conversation that whoever made that wooden structure half a million years ago…