People keep producing trivial reports, and someone's got to acknowledge their existence; I guess that must be me.  And you.  Which makes this post meta-trivial.  Let's get to it, then. 

Have archaeologists located the cenotaph of Romulus?

Oh this is fun--Seyla Benhabib on Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition.

Obama as writer was Obama the reader, though, let's admit it, the account of Heart of Darkness is pretty much missing the whole point.  

It's possible--I'm not (as this article's author is) saying probable, just possible--that a piece of one of Queen Elizabeth's dresses still exists, and is kept in a village in England:

“there is no documentary evidence supporting the idea that the cloth belonged to either Elizabeth or Parry. Still, she writes, records show that the queen often gifted her beloved attendant various fineries and perhaps “retained enough affection for Blanche to donate the valuable skirt fabric in memory of her.” The exceptionally skilled workmanship evident on the cloth—“This quality suggests that it was intended for the highest level of customer,” Lynn notes, pointing out that Elizabeth enforced sumptuary laws prohibiting other women from wearing such finery—and the fact that it was used as a sacred, and therefore revered, item, further supports the argument for its royal origins.”

Useful not only as illuminating analysis, but also for its practical advice.  

Egyptology has been hopping of late, with the discovery of the largest number of ancient coffins (with mummies) since the 19th century and now the discovery of mummified lion cubs; and Egypt is keeping the research on these things to its own researchers for now.  Very interesting.   

Ooh this is enrapturing.  And provocative: 

    Forty-four thousand years later, we have part of a story but no context; there's no way to know who the hunters or their giant prey were or exactly what they meant to the people of Sulawesi. The long-ago artist may have been memorializing the content of a spiritual leader's recent vision or a scene from a legend already well known to their people. The image may have conveyed something important about the connection between humans and animals or predator and prey, or it may have been an origin story or a dire warning.

    But the Liang Bulu'Sipong 4 painting may provide the oldest hint about spiritual beliefs, and Aubert and his colleagues say it could contribute to the ongoing debate about how our species developed religion. The panel could have a lot to say about how and when hominins evolved the cognitive ability to think about myth and religion and about how human cultures developed shared beliefs about the supernatural.

At the moment, the leading ideas suggest that before we could develop religion, we had to develop the ability to think and talk about things that don't exist in the natural, physical world. We had to learn to describe and imagine not just things we had already seen, but things no one had ever seen—like therianthropes and giant wild animals. In other words, we had to invent the concept of fiction.”

A study of the history of the domestication of the olive tree around the Mediterranean.  Cool stuff.   

Challenges to "shareholder value capitalism" are growing, even among capitalists.