|
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARICEU ERTHAL GARCÍA, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
|
|
Renaissance: For 2,500 years people have been making pottery in southern Mexico, and in one village legend contends the famous barro negro, black clay pottery, is blessed. Demand is rising for the pottery, such as the jug (above left), Nat Geo reports. Potters such as Griselda Mateo Gutiérrez (above right) use quartz to burnish their work.
A new way of thinking: Today marks the start of Native American Heritage Month, and it comes as Native Americans and others are recasting views of Indigenous life, Tristan Antone has written for National Geographic.
Virgin birth? A claim like this often inspires skepticism, but a peer-reviewed study says it is happening among endangered California condors. Though rare in vertebrates, parthenogenesis occurs in sharks, rays, and lizards. Scientists have also recorded self-fertilization in some captive turkeys and chickens, usually only when females are housed without access to a male, Jason Bittel reports.
A tarnished founder: California’s Hastings College of the Law was founded by a man who masterminded the Gold Rush-era killings of hundreds of Native Americans, a four-year review has found. A massacre engineered by Serranus Hastings, the state’s first chief justice, was among those in which thousands of Native Americans were killed by white settlers who wanted their land. “The killers’ travel and ammunition expenses were reimbursed by the state of California and the federal government,” the New York Times reports. The law school, which counts Vice President Kamala Harris among its alumni, is debating next steps, including changing its name from that of a mass murderer.
A victory for the Narragansett: The site where English colonists massacred hundreds of the Narragansett people more than 345 years ago has officially been returned to the tribe, The Public’s Radio reports. The Rhode Island Historical Society, which maintained the site of the Great Swamp Massacre since 1906, turned it back over in a ceremony on October 23. Amid King Philip’s War in December 1675, about 1,000 colonists attacked a Narragansett stronghold, killing an estimated 650 men, women, and children, and taking 300 more captive.
|
|
|
|
