Seals

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvelously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have traveled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’ As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvellously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have travelled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.

My first love was a penguin. Pengwee was an adorable brown and white emperor chick who had my heart and broke it the day he dived into the bath. After a week in the airing cupboard he smelled of fish – surprising in a soft toy. But then penguins are surprising. Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago in Zealandia, a fragment of the Gondwana supercontinent, penguins waddled off along their own evolutionary path. Other birds flew through air; penguins flew through water. Natural selection pi-pi-pimped up the penguin (sorry) to astonishing specialisation. Hunting in black oceanic deeps, many species can see in ultraviolet.