Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were ritually sacrificed, kicked out of the galaxy, taxonomically revised, and wore many hats.First, scientists shed light on human sacrifice and cousin sex using ancient DNA from the bones of people who lived in fifth-century Korea. Then: the yeeting of a star, an octopus imposter, and the indignities of a bare head.\u00a0As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.All in the Family (this time with human sacrifice)Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al. \u201cAncient genomes reveal an extensive kinship network and endogamy in a Three-Kingdoms period society in Korea.\u201d Science Advances.Ready or not, it\u2019s time to visit an ancient burial ground packed with the bones of sacrificed families. Welcome to the Imdang-Joyeong site in Korea, which contains a cluster of 1,500-year-old tombs from the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period.As the name suggests, this era was dominated by a trio of warring dynastic factions called the Goguryeo, Baekjae, and Silla. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Silla kingdom followed unique customs, including the practice of \u201cSunjang,\u201d a coburial of sacrificed people with an elite grave owner, as well as consanguineous marriages\u2014marriages between close blood relatives.Now, researchers have now sequenced ancient DNA from 78 deceased individuals to corroborate the findings with confirmed lineages. The results revealed that consanguineous marriages were indeed common, and that adult women were often buried together with their own kin, which is a rarity in ancient graveyards around the world.The three main geographical locations of the tombs consisting of the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex with separate zoom-in panels (i to iii). The green gradient represents elevation, and the green circles represent the position of dirt mounds of the tombs. Image: Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al.\u201cSilla is thought to have practiced different marital customs from that of its neighbors, such as Goguryeo,\u201d said researchers co-led by Hyoungmin Moon of Seoul National University and Daewook Kim of Yeungnam University. \u201cMost notably, Silla royal elites are documented to have practiced consanguineous marriage, which is rarely observed in Goguryeo and Baekjae records. Historical accounts of consanguineous marriage are thought to be related to the consolidation of the rank and social status within Silla royals and local elites.\u201d\u201cHowever, because of limited ancient genome studies in Korea, no corroborating genomic evidence so far has been reported regarding the marriage customs of the Three-Kingdoms period Koreans,\u201d the team added. \u201cOur research is the first to analyze the genome-wide composition of closely related individuals from an ancient Three-Kingdoms period of Korea.\u201dFrom left to right, a Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla envoy depicted in a 6th-century painting.Many tombs at this site include separate chambers for elite grave owners, and for sacrificed people, which often included entire families that may have been ritually sacrificed and buried alongside their masters. Both elites and sacrificed individuals were often born from unions between first or second cousins, suggesting that consanguineous marriages were common across class lines.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWe found decisive evidence of three cases of families in which parents and their offspring were sacrificed together in the same grave,\u201d the team said. \u201cOur genetic findings are the first to confirm the acts of Sunjang of an entire household and suggest that these practices might be common for sacrificial burials of the Three-Kingdoms period.\u201dIn addition, some adult women were buried alongside their parents and grandparents, a pattern that is rare in most other ancient burial grounds in which women tend to be buried alongside their husbands and in-laws. The study offers a rare glimpse of a society with idiosyncratic customs that is ready-made to be the setting of a new HBO prestige series.In other news\u2026\u2669 It\u2019s a shooting star leaping through the sky \u2669Bhat, Aakash et al. \u201cDiscovery of a runaway star likely ejected by a Type Iax supernova.\u201d Astronomy & Astrophysics.Some space explosions go so hard that they can kick a star right out of a galaxy. Scientists report the serendipitous discovery of one of these so-called \u201crunaway stars\u201d that was likely ejected from the galaxy approximately 2.8 million years ago \u201cwith an ejection velocity exceeding 600 kilometers per second\u201d\u2014or about 1.3 million miles per hour\u2014according to a new study.\u00a0This cosmic sprinter is a white dwarf, the collapsed remains of a star, that was accelerated to ludicrous speed by a \u201cType Iax\u201d supernovae, a type of stellar kablooey that occurs in some binary star systems.\u00a0\u00a0This runaway star \u201cis notably hotter than previously studied members of this class,\u201d said researchers led by Aakash Bhat of the University of Potsdam. \u201cKinematic analysis indicates that the star has a high probability of being unbound from the Galaxy.\u201dSo long, runaway star, and safe travels through intergalactic space.\u00a0A 300-million-year-old case of mistaken identityClements, Thomas et al. \u201cSynchrotron data reveal nautiloid characters in Pohlsepia mazonensis, refuting a Palaeozoic origin for octobrachians.\u201d Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Prepare to be ink-pilled, because it turns out that the oldest known octopus fossil ever found\u2014a 300-million-year old species called Pohlsepia mazonensis\u2014is not an octopus at all. It is a member of the nautilus family that just ended up looking sort of like an octopus in part because its shell fell off during the decomposition process.Concept art of dead Pohlsepia mazonensis with its shell off. Image: Dr Thomas Clements, University of Reading\u201cWe present the first comprehensive reassessment of this enigmatic fossil, alongside multiple new specimens, using a suite of advanced analytical techniques,\u201d said researchers led by Thomas Clements of the University of Reading. During this process, the team discovered a special \u201cradula\u201d\u2014a feeding organ lined with rows of teeth\u2014that matched the nautilus family.\u00a0As a result, P. mazonensis \u201crepresents the oldest known fossil soft tissue nautiloid (albeit without its shell),\u201d the team concluded. The finding is a boon to octopus scientists (a.k.a. Doc Ocks) who have been perplexed for years by this specimen, given that the fossil record otherwise suggests that octopuses emerged much later in time, during the age of dinosaurs.It just proves the old adage: Don\u2019t believe everything you hear about the evolutionary origins of octopuses.\u00a0\u00a0We\u2019re all mad hatters hereCapp, Bernard. \u201cThe Cultural, Social, and Ideological Role of the Hat in Early Modern England.\u201d The Historical Journal.We\u2019ll cap off with a hat tip to a study that chronicles hat etiquette across early modern England, roughly spanning the 1400s to 1700s.\u00a0Authored by the aptly-named Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick, the work is packed with madcap anecdotes about hats as signifiers of identity, instruments of shame, tools for salutations, and even makeshift toilets in the most ribald tales.\u201cThe \u2018Pleasant History\u2019 of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated,\u201d Capp noted in the study. \u201cSuch behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival\u2019s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim\u2019s head.\u201dRoundhead and cavalier soldiers, wearing partisan hats, face each other and urge their dogs to attack each other. Image: John Taylor (attributed), A dialogue, or, Rather a parley betweene Prince Ruperts dogge whose name is Puddle, and Tobies dog whose name is Pepper (1643).Other highlights include the Cap Act of 1571, which allowed offenders \u201cto be prosecuted for wearing hats to church;\u201d jokes about fine ladies wearing towering ribboned hats that spooked local livestock; and a man named Thomas Ellwood who was rendered unable to leave his house for months in 1659 because his father confiscated all his hats, because who would dare, in his words, to \u201crun about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man\u201d?Hats off to this heady historical work, and beware the bareheaded Mad-Men.\u00a0Thanks for reading! See you next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"