You take the Yayoi, you take the Jomon, you take em both and there you have, the Japanese. That’s what linguists recently confirmed as they sought to examine dialects in use in modern Japan to find a single common ancestor. The linguists instead found two. Back when people were following mastodon and picking berries along the way, hunting and gathering subsistence, you might say, they used a lot of land bridges to get around; the Jomon tribe were no exception. About 20,000 years ago when a strip of land now underwater connected Japan to the Asian mainland, the Jomon made their way over to the future island and picked their berries there. About 17,600 years later, the Yayoi, a rice-cultivating culture from the Chinese mainland made their way over to Japan. Apparently, the two groups liked the looks of one another, because they reproduced and gave us our modern Japanese people. (And thank heaven for that.)It was the Yayoi language that won out, however, and proved the eventual basis for the Japanese language.

In a completely unrelated story (aside from the relative proximity of Japan to Vietnam), the Consumerist published a post on a group of web classifieds by some hotels in Hanoi seeking freelance writers looking to make cash writing fake hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. Also, from this post, I learned that there is such a thing as TripAdvisorWatch, a website dedicated to rooting out such fraud on what are meant to be grassroots travel sites. I imagined that there was plenty of fraud among the helpful advice on sites like that, so much so that I generally only consider the bad reviews authentic. Apparently, not everyone does this and my hat is off to TAW for taking it upon themselves to protect the naïve and innocent.

In honor of recent findings by fish behavioral researcher Hans Fricke that the coelacanth, the ancient fish thought long-extinct that was found alive and well off the coast of South Africa by fishermen in 1938, may live to as old as age 100, the blog Quigley’s Cabinet posted an account of the initial meeting between humans and the fish. While the species itself was found to be alive and well, the specimen that gave up the secret of the rest of its brethren was very much dead by the time that it came into the hands of Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer, a curator at the natural history museum nearby the place where the fish was caught. Seems Courtenay-Latimer made a habit of hanging out around the docks when local fisherman alerted her of any strange sea life that they’d hauled up in their nets. On this day, she didn’t recognize the coelacanth, only that it was remarkable:

“I was just about to leave when a strange bluish fin poking through the pile caught my eye. It was like no fish fin I had ever seen in all my years at the museum. The Captain and I shoved the other fish off the top of the pile to uncover the owner of the odd fin. There it lay before me, the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings. I am no fish expert, but I had the strange feeling that somehow this fish was special.”

The best part is that she decided to take the fish back to the museum for study right then and there:

“I decided to take the fish with me, and after a heated discussion with the taxi driver, we stuffed the huge fish into the backseat of the cab and headed off for the museum.”

And here’s a brief, very neat animated documentary on the history of evil from classical Greece to present day: