Curio Cabinet / Daily Curio

Most of us probably imagine Neanderthals as the stooped, broad-shouldered cavemen from grade school textbooks. But according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One last week, Neanderthals also preferred to spend their time in the water—perhaps more so than ancient humans. As far back as 1911, researchers have taken notice of exostosis growths in the ear canals of Neanderthal remains. These bony protrusions grow in response to routine exposure to cold weather and water, and as a disease have been nicknamed "surfer's ear." This drew the attention of Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus. Together with his team, he analyzed 77 remains of early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals to compare their inner ear growths. Surprisingly, only a quarter of the human skulls contained signs of surfer's ear, but roughly half of the Neanderthal specimens did. Why is this ear growth so important? It gives evidence that our evolutionary cousins spent a lot of time outside of the cave in water, and were possibly expert fishers or oyster divers. Primordial fishing required some serious gray matter, considering one had to monitor the behavior of rivers, fish, and the weather. For this reason, Trinkaus believes there's a chance we've severely misunderestimated the intellectual capacity of Neanderthals. Other anthropologists, meanwhile, argue that our cousins simply had a genetic vulnerability to surfer's ear. At any rate, Trinkaus' observations serve as another reminder to keep long-standing scientific conclusions under the microscope. Who knows, maybe Neanderthals really did hang ten!
 

Image credit & copyright: Natural History Museum
 

Construction of the Berlin Wall began on today's date in 1961. For all you kids out there too young to recall the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was an iconic symbol of the "Iron Curtain": a physical and psychological barrier between the communist East and the capitalist West. The Wall separated the East and West halves of Germany, which was partitioned after World War II. The leaders of East Germany beseeched the Soviet Union to build the Berlin Wall to stop its citizens from fleeing to the more prosperous West Germany. For roughly three decades, the wall was closely guarded and East Germans attempting to surmount it had to cross a "death strip" under threat of being shot. But one whimsical day, on the evening of November 9, 1989, a member of East Germany's politburo named Günter Schabowski flubbed on an epic scale. At a televised news conference, Schabowski was addressing questions from journalists about East Germany's strict travel restrictions. He was totally unprepared for the task, and as he flipped through his notecards, he let slip that East Germany was going to allow its citizens to leave the country through any of its border crossings. He also stammered that the new regulation would take effect immediately. What he meant to say was that East Germans could temporarily leave after a grueling visa application process. But it was too late. Hordes of ecstatic East Germans converged on the wall, expecting to waltz into West Germany. Harald Jäger, an officer at one of the Berlin Wall's checkpoints, phoned in his superiors but was mocked by them. Facing a cancer diagnostic test the following day, a stressed-out Jäger shrugged and opened the border to the masses. Other checkpoints opened up in response. It was the beginning of the end for East Germany: in a year, the Berlin Wall was torn down. Thanks to Schabowski's bungle, Jäger's cavalier attitude, East Germans' fascination with Western culture, and President Ronald Reagan's aggressive foreign policies, East Germany soon collapsed. It was reunified with Western Germany in 1990 as a single, free nation. And that's how communism was driven up the wall!
 

Image credit & copyright: STR/EPA
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

If you thought water was bad for witches, you haven't seen one catch on fire. For today's Wizard of Oz Themed Thursday, we're taking a look at one of the most misunderstood characters in pop culture—the Wicked Witch of the West. Sure, she terrorized a bunch of munchkins with magic and threatened to stuff a mattress with the Scarecrow, but hey, we all have our bad days. Actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the witch, had them, too. While filming the scene where the flying sorceress first sees Dorothy and disappears in a plume of fire, Hamilton was supposed to safely ride a secret elevator below set. But the elevator was more of a detriment than a safeguard. When special effects misfires caught her dress, hat, and broom on fire, it trapped her below stage. Hamilton suffered third-degree burns, and filming was postponed until she fully recovered. But her witchy woes didn't end there, my pretties. The green face paint Hamilton donned every day was so toxic, she had to delicately feed via a straw, lest she get sick. And then there was the matter of Hamilton's accommodations: while she bunked in a small canvas tent, Billie Burke—who played Glinda the Good Witch—had a palatial dressing room on the MGM lot. Years later, Hamilton would confess to sneaking into Burke's room to slurp lunch (through a straw) when the Good Witch wasn't on set. Reading about Hamilton's Oz experience has my heart melting, melting, melting.
 
Image credit & copyright: Everett Collection
 

We all get wild ideas… but not all of us end up sailing across the Pacific without proper training because of them. On today's date in 1947, Norwegian adventurer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl successfully boated from Peru to the Polynesian islands on a replica pre-Columbian raft. Heyerdahl hatched the idea for his journey a decade earlier, while studying wildlife in the South Pacific with his wife. There, he made tenuous connections between South American plants and iconography and those of Polynesia. At the time, scholarly wisdom posited that Polynesians descended from ancient Asian explorers. But Heyerdahl began theorizing that Polynesians instead originated from South America. His speculation was scoffed at by academics, who believed that pre-Incan societies lacked the nautical know-how to manage a journey all the way to Polynesia. So, naturally, Heyerdahl set out to show them. He hired a sailing crew and created a 30-by-15-foot, authentic pre-Incan raft crafted from nine balsa wood logs and hemp rope endemic to Ecuador. He named it Kon-Tiki, after a legendary Peruvian figure who disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Maritime authorities warned Heyerdahl that his expedition was doomed to fail and he would surely die, but the explorer—who couldn't even swim—remained undaunted.
 

On April 28, 1947, Heyerdahl launched the Kon-Tiki after smashing a coconut against its bow. He and his crew were carried along by northeast-east trade winds, and navigated using only winds, currents, stars, and the sun—just as ancient South American explorers would have. They nourished themselves by eating flying fish that flopped aboard the raft, or by snacking on seaweed and shellfish that grew on the vessel's underside. Using only sails, paddles, and an unpredictable steering oar, they covered 4,300 nautical miles in 101 days, cresting massive waves that at times rose higher than the mast of their ship. Then, on August 7, the Kon-Tiki collided with a reef in French Polynesia. The ship was wrecked, but the crew managed a safe landfall. Heyerdahl became a minor celebrity and published a memoir about his adventure, Kon-Tiki, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning documentary film. Despite the fame, he never proved his theory about Polynesia was correct, only remotely plausible. Regardless, I'm sure Heyerdahl earned the respect of those academics—if not as an intellectual, as a fearless explorer!
 

Image credit & copyright: Kon-Tiki Museum
 

It's all fun and games until you're sentenced to public humiliation. On today's date in 1703, English merchant, political pamphleteer, and writer Daniel Defoe was shackled in a pillory and displayed at the mercy of the public. Born circa 1660 to a candlemaker father as just Foe, he added "De" for aristocratic prestige. From there, he tried his luck as a merchant and went bankrupt (but not before purchasing his own ship and a country estate). Yet his mighty ambition remained undeterred. He became a political writer, using 198 pseudonyms to pen outrageously controversial pamphlets. He identified as Puritan—English Protestants dissatisfied with the dominant Anglican Church and its stranglehold on the religious expression of minority faiths. Rather than pen a bulleted list of his grievances, Defoe anonymously wrote The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satirical pamphlet which suggested that killing religious dissenters was the most clear-cut solution for Anglicans. Some Anglican Tories publicly concurred with the pamphlet and faced subsequent humiliation. They responded by charging Defoe with seditious libel, and placed his head and hands in restraints, so crowds could pitch dirt, excrement, and stones at him. Unbeknownst to the authorities, Defoe had spent his moments before the punishment composing "Hymn to the Pillory," yet another satire. He recited the piece to the crowds, and instead of pelting him, they showered him with flowers and drank to his health. Defoe justly served his "sentence" and went on to become a prolific writer, channeling his politics and real-life exploits into famous novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719). I've heard of turning lemons into lemonade, but never feces into flowers!
 

Image credit & copyright: Alamy
 

It's been over a century since visitors were last allowed in the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. That's because on today's date in 1916, a massive explosion on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor peppered Lady Liberty with shrapnel, forever compromising the structural integrity of her limb. Over 2,000,000 tons of military ordnance were on the island. At the time, that was 75 percent of all the ammunition and explosives the U.S. had prepared for shipment to Allied countries fighting in World War I. The armaments detonated just after 2:00 a.m. and registered 5.5 on the Richter scale, shattering most of the windows in Manhattan and waking people as far away as Philadelphia and Maryland. At least seven died, countless others were wounded, and damages amounted to $500 million adjusted for inflation. The fledgling FBI, which had only just formed in 1908, raced to the scene. Its investigators discovered that two guards at Black Tom happened to be German secret agents, Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke. Both had vanished. An unlikely spy ring consisting of German imperialists, Irish republicans, and Indian nationalists was later uncovered. Jahnke and Witzke had planted explosives disguised as cigars around the island, and executed synchronized explosions to thwart U.S. weapons sales to Allies. It was the single largest act of terrorism inflicted on the continental U.S. up until the events of 9/11, and contributed to Congress' later decisions to pass the Espionage Act and declare war on Germany in 1917. In the end, the explosion on Black Tom Island royally backfired, and Imperial Germany had yet another enemy to fight. Sorry, Kaiser Wilhelm. Close but no, um, cigar!
 

Image credit & copyright: AFP/Getty Images
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Meet Rocky. Not the boxer played by Sylvester Stallone, but the orangutan who lives at the Indianapolis Zoo. The 12-year-old primate has demonstrated the ability to control his vocal chords the same way humans do. He can perfectly mimic speech sounds made by a person. Rob Shumaker, the zoo's director, says Rocky's voice control shows our ancestors probably had the ability to make speech before humans and the great apes diverged genetically around ten million years ago. Previously, biologists thought our ability to speak required changes to the human brain that didn't happen until around two million years ago.
 
None of this would have been discovered if it weren't for Hollywood's fondness of using orangutans. Rocky was separated from his mother at birth and raised largely by people who trained him for show business. He starred in movies, TV ads, and even a photo shoot with the rock star Fergie. It was during this exposure to humans that Rocky started making an unusual call or vocalization. Shumaker and the other zoo scientists named Rocky's new sound a "Wookie" because it sounded like the Star Wars character Chewbacca. They soon realized Rocky's new sound—never before observed in any primate—must have been learned. So they concocted an experiment to try and teach him other sounds. To their surprise, he was able to perfectly match vowel sounds made by an experimenter. Soon Rocky was pairing consonants with the vowels, and matching the pitch of a human voice. While Rocky can now make speech-like sounds and rhythms, it technically isn't speech since his "Wookies" don't appear to mean anything. Where is Han Solo when we need him?
 

Slippery banana peels have been a comedy trope since the early 20th century, appearing in everything from Vaudeville shows to the Looney Tunes. But just how did the fruit skins get their menacing reputation? It's not exactly common to see someone pratfall on a banana peel. Well, the answer lies in late 19th-century New York City, a notoriously grimy and corrupt corner of American history. At the time, international merchants had just discovered how to safely transport unspoiled bananas from the Caribbean. Vendors also marketed banana skins as "sanitary wrappers" and encouraged customers to toss them in the streets, which were already piled ankle-deep with trash. Corrupt city officials, rather than form a sanitation department, thought (in vain) that releasing wild pigs into the streets would solve their garbage problem. Instead, banana peels shingled thoroughfares and browned and slickened until they blended in with cobblestones. Pedestrians slipped left and right, some suffering debilitating injuries that put them in the poorhouse. One Anna Sturla slipped 17 times in just four years, receiving $2,950 in compensation for her surgeries. Finally, in the 1890s, a series of corruption scandals resulted in Col. George Waring becoming the commissioner of the new Department of Sanitation. He whipped a legion of street-cleaners called the White Wings into tip-top shape—uniforming them in all white to symbolize sanitation—before unleashing them on New York City. They met staunch resistance in poor communities, which had grown to distrust public officials, and had to fight their way through alleyways until they earned local respect. The streets were eventually squeegeed clean. The terrible banana peel plight all but disappeared, left to live on only in pop culture. It's worth noting that the fresh banana peels depicted in movies and on television aren't actually very slippery. It's the rotten ones that are dangerous, due to greasy polysaccharide molecule secretions. But who wants to see that on TV?
 

Image credit & copyright: Brian A. Jackson/Shutterstock