Today in Weird Science News: The Sarcophagus is a Letdown, Your Early Memories May Be Fake, and Ancient Dude Thought Getting Laid Saved Lives

If you’re like me, you were probably excited to hear an ancient sarcophagus had been found in Alexandria, Egypt. I mean, according to all the movies I’ve ever seen on the subject, this should introduce us to an ancient curse or a mummy zombie—hey, there’s a new category of TV shows for you—or maybe something more rational, like a nice plague. Or at least a stash of gold treasure.

Instead, when investigators opened the box, all they found was…old bones. Yeah, exactly what you’d expect in a sarcophagus. And also, raw sewage that somehow leaked inside.  I wonder what kind of warranty they offered on coffins in 332 B.C? Think the company that made it is still around?

Also, some wiseass started a change.org petition asking for permission to drink the mummy sewage juice because… people are fucking nuts, that’s why.

Okay, maybe the end of the world was too much to hope for. But another interesting piece of science news this week caught my attention. Researchers in England say that memories from before the age of 2 are probably fake. In one study, they found that forty percent of participants claimed to have memories from their “preverbal” stage between 9 and 12 months of age. The study’s author says people can’t actual form memories at this age, and are most likely thinking they remember an event based on pictures they’ve seen or stories they were told.

I found this interesting, as I recently had a conversation with someone who didn’t think it was possible for a character in a story to remember something that happened when she was three. I thought that was silly, because I can clearly remember the plots of Sesame Street episodes I watched at that age, what I got for Christmas that year, what I wanted but didn’t get, and what my favorite t-shirt was.

So I did some Googling, and what I found was that most people don’t remember anything before the age of 3, and many memories from that time period often fade by the age of 6 or 7. The average age of a first memory is estimated to be about 3.5.

Then there’s the really exciting science news of the week: An ancient Grego-Roman dude named Galen, who was presumably whatever passed for a doctor two thousand years ago, had a fascinating theory: According to an old piece of papyrus paper that was recently translated, Galen believed women could die of “hysterical apnea” due to lack of sex. In other words, he thought that if women didn’t get laid they’d just spontaneously stop breathing. I’m going to assume he also thought he was saving a life every time he did the horizontal tango. I can just picture the bumper sticker on his chariot: “Save water, save yourself, shower with me.” Or maybe he wrote on public restroom stall doors, “For hysterical apnea treatment, call 55-GALEN.”

V. R. Craft is the author of Stupid Humans, the first in a #scifi series that asks the question, “What if all the intelligent humans ran away from Earth—and we’re what’s left?”

 

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