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Stand in a museum in front of an ancient inscription and read the label beneath it. It will give you a translation. Clean sentences in your own language, punctuated, confident, printed in a serif typeface on a small white card. Almost everything about that card is a construction. Somebody decided what those marks represented. Somebody decided which language they encoded. Somebody chose, among several possible readings, the one that made the best sense, and somebody else disag

There is a fish on a coral reef living in a small group. The largest individual is female. When she dies, the largest male changes sex, becomes female, and takes her place. This happens routinely. It is not an aberration. It is how the species works. Somewhere else, a female seahorse deposits eggs into a pouch on the male's abdomen, and he carries them, nourishes them and gives birth to live young. In a hyena clan, every female outranks every male. In an elephant herd, an old

Somebody carved a rhinoceros on the coast of India. There are no rhinoceroses on the coast of India. There have not been within any human memory, in any record, in any account. And yet there it is, cut into the flat rust red rock above the Arabian Sea, alongside a hippopotamus, in a place where neither animal has any business existing. Somebody carved them. Which means somebody saw them. Everything else in this article follows from that single fact, and we would ask you to ke