If so, the archaeologists want you to serve a great cause.

“Researchers intend to make a replica of the “Cairo toe”, a bending leather and wood attachment that they believe could be the world’s earliest practical prosthetic.
They are seeking volunteers, who are missing big toes on their right feet, to test their theory that the fake toe helped its original user to walk.”

(Well it is a great way for the tourism authority to get a free plug…)

Parents have always played with their children, it’s “natural”, “essential”, normal… well no:

The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems….
To be sure, there are exceptions. Some African foraging tribes display striking examples of parental playfulness. And the Inuit make toys for their toddlers and get goofy — but they’re cooped up for months at a time in igloos, bored witless. Lancy suggests that the American milieu — caregivers stuck, without a community, in oversized homes — is not entirely dissimilar.

Well worth reading the whole thing…

Forgive me a touch of scepticism, but I can’t resist pointing to the story around today just about everywhere that discarded pants helped to boost literacy: claiming that it was when urbanisation led people to more widely adopt underwear, unlike those uninsulated peasant farmers, that there were lots of rags around from which to make paper.

As someone on the medieval list pointed out, lots of that underwear would have been made from wool, and thence useless for papermaking, and I’d like to point out that in Caxton’s time (contrary to the story’s claim), paper was not at all cheap – making up half or more of the cost of a book – and imported into Britain right until the end of the 16th century.

But hey, why spoil a nice tale?