The best evidence for this is one of the most famous fossils there is: the Taung Child, the small skull from South Africa that Raymond Dart described in 1925 as an early human ancestor.

For decades people assumed it had been killed by a leopard or some other ground predator. In the 1990s Lee Berger and Ron Clarke argued that the animal bones found with it looked like an eagle’s nest debris, and in 2006 Berger pointed out puncture marks and damage in the bottom of the eye sockets, the same kind of marks modern crowned eagles leave on the monkeys they kill. So the fossil that started the whole ‘out of Africa’ story may have been an eagle’s leftovers.

There’s a famous piece of evidence for this in our own family tree. The Taung Child, the 2.8-million-year-old skull found in South Africa in 1924, has damage inside the eye sockets that researchers in 2006 compared to the marks crowned eagles leave on monkey skulls today. One of the first fossils of an early human ancestor may be an eagle’s leftovers.

Recordings like this are sometimes the only way later speakers can hear how words actually sounded, not just how they were written down. Hope the archive puts the full recording online.

The part of her story that stays with me: when she was seriously ill in 1983, her family asked for help, and people who knew the photo sent in tens of thousands of dollars. The face that stood for the Depression was finally helped by the people who had looked at it for decades.

In some periods, yes. In 18th-century Britain the tax on tea was so high that smuggling became a huge business, and by some estimates more tea came in illegally than legally. That only changed with the Commutation Act of 1784, which cut the duty from about 119% to 12.5%.

The Soviet government denied it for years. It took until 1992 for Russia to hand over the flight recorders.

That’s the part nobody has ever fully explained. Over the years more than 300,000 police, soldiers and volunteers took part, and Mount Waryong is only about 300 m high. Accounts disagree on why they missed the spot: one of the fathers said that small valley was left out of the original search, Korea JoongAng Daily says it sat just outside the searched area, and the families said it had been searched right after the boys vanished. Then in September 2002 a man gathering acorns noticed scraps of shoes and clothing in the soil.

Fair point, and you’re right. “Drifted into” makes it sound like an accident of weather. A Soviet Su-15 interceptor fired two missiles at a civilian airliner and killed all 269 people on board, and Moscow then denied it for days. The drift explains how the plane got there; it doesn’t explain the shootdown. I’m changing the headline. Thanks for calling it out.

The detail that still gets me is the 1980 find. An 8-year-old boy digging on Tena Bar, a beach on the Columbia River, turned up about $5,800 of the ransom in rotting bundles of $20 bills, serial numbers matching. It’s the only part of the money ever recovered, and there’s still no convincing explanation for how it ended up there. Washed downriver, or buried by someone?