Saturday Morning Links

1. Want to know how to make me jealous? Show me a story about a guy traveling the world with his dog.

Everybody love everybody.

2. This is great. OutsideOnline tells the story of Bryan and Patrick, who quit their jobs to build a cabin in the middle of the woods with almost no experience.

During those last few weeks of work in the spring, if we had the energy, we stayed up late talking about where we wanted to be in ten or 20 years. There was something about building that was exactly as we had hoped. We loved that we weren’t staring at our computers all day. We loved how stiff our backs felt. Loved that our hands were so sore by dinner that squeezing a lime onto a taco felt like an Olympic event. We loved the excitement that would come from kicking the friggin’ bejeezus out of a task, screws flying into boards straight and strong, music blaring, working as a team without the need for communication beyond high-fives. Building felt like a natural extension of everything we valued in our lives: creativity, friendship, purpose, responsibility.

3. I love science and I love the fact that we’re still learning and what we think we know changes based on new evidence. Again, that’s a good thing too. Via National Geographic’s Kristin Romey, new evidence has been discovered that places humans in North America 30,000 years ago, which is twice as early as originally thought. The cool thing about this is that it is debatable if the evidence is correct. Still learning is a wonderful thing.

Then there’s the startling fact that the style of toolmaking—the distinctive way the stones appear to have been shaped—is utterly unique.

“It’s very curious that the assemblage is so different from anything anyone has known before,” says archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University. “How is it possible that it’s not related to anything previously found? Well, it’s possible.”

4. Sometimes slavery seems like something is so long ago, but these are the words the son of a slave. Via the Washington Post’s Sydney Trent, the words of Daniel Smith, 88 years old, and he listened to his father, Abram Smith, tell stories of being born a slave and the Civil War.

There was the whipping post in the middle of the plantation where enslaved people were tied up and beaten.

There was the lynching tree. Two enslaved people in chains had run away together, and rumors held that they had been hanged there. Later, when Dan Smith wanted to date white girls, his mother would warn: “I don’t want to have to cut you down.”

There was the wagon wheel. The enslaver accused a man on the plantation of an unspecified offense, and the man denied it. “The owner said, ‘You’re lying to me,’ and had the man and his whole family line up in the winter in front of a wooden wagon wheel,” Smith recounted. The enslaver ordered the man to kneel and lick the wheel’s metal rim. His tongue froze there until the desperate man pulled part of it away.

5. It’s ridiculous how much I see the world through my kids’ eyes, but from the BBC, DNA evidence suggests that 12.5 million Africans were traded as slaves from 1515 through the mid-19th Century and that most descendants of slaves have roots in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is Youssouf’s home country and cannot help but think that his although his direct family wasn’t affected, what about family members that may have been taken that are here in the USA now? What if he has close descendants here, right now? Obviously, the genetic test is something he’ll have to choose to do.