Loneliness today, and how to exist in it: “The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. Other people have been afraid, waited, listened for news. Other people have survived. The whole world is in the same boat. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.”  

Social isolation? The Faroes say, hold my beer.  A surprisingly gripping (to me, anyway) story about living in real social isolation.

I get a thing called The Scout Report, which is a great source from U-Dub (that is, the University of Wisconsin for you ignorami) for “high quality online content.”  They do a weekly roundup which is great. This week they pointed me to a website on the diary of Samuel Pepys, and it has many things, including a way to get a daily diary entry via email!  The diary runs for about a decade, so this will occupy me for some time.

And two other pieces on Pepys and the plague, one about how “social” he was during the Great Plague of 1665, the other using his diary to “blog” the Great Plague.  

Really interesting piece on professional writers’ writing habits:  

Scientists retrieved the oldest human genetic data set from an 800,000-year-old tooth belonging to the hominin species Homo antecessor.  “Our results support the idea that Homo antecessor was a sister group to the group containing Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans," says the lead scholar in the piece.  This means, says another scholar, that Homo antecessor is “a basal species of the emerging humanity formed by Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans"

And more paleoanthropology:

"The picture in my mind now is we have all these archaic hominin populations in Europe, in Asia, in Siberia, in Africa. For one reason or another, the ancestors of modern humans in Africa start expanding in population, and as they expand their range, they meet with these other hominins and absorb their DNA, if you will," Gokcumen says. "We probably met different Neanderthal populations at different times in our expansion into other parts of the globe.…the story of human evolution is not so much like at tree with branches that just grow in different directions. It turns out that the branches have all these connections between them."

And in other paleoanthropology news: “Homo erectus shared the landscape with two other types of humans in South Africa, Paranthropus and Australopithecus," ” showing that Homo erectus was alive and kicking two million years ago, which is about 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Monday--the start of the week!  Does it feel like a week to you?  How are you marking the different days, the different hours?  I'd like to know.  Be well, everybody.  Wash your hands.