The Crooked Forest

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowe_czarnowo-krzywy_las.jpeg

Outside the village of Nowe Czarnowo in western Poland is a grove of 400 pine trees bent into curious crooked shapes. The surrounding trees are straight, but these were apparently deliberately bent north at their bases about 10 years after their planting in 1930. No one knows why.

VIA: –FUTILITY CLOSET

Modern Humans Once Mated w/ Other Species

It’s weird to think that tens of thousands of years ago, humans were mating with different species—but they were. That’s what DNA analyses tell us. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, it showed that as much as 1 to 4 percent of the DNA of non-Africans might have been inherited from Neanderthals. (Given that no African populations are known to have Neanderthal DNA, the matings must have occurred as modern humans moved into Europe and Asia). Scientists also announced last year that our ancestors had mated with another extinct species, and this week, more evidence is showing how widespread that interbreeding was.

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