• “Early human ancestors living millions of years ago may have triggered extinctions, even before our species evolved, a study suggests.” (BBC News)

• Editing The Dolphin Letters. (Vanity Fair)

• On Margaret Mead and her critics. (Aeon)

• “This gunflint is special. In 2008 my students and I, working with nearby residents, unearthed this unassuming little artifact during an archaeological dig in a little Pennsylvania village known as Christiana. We found it located in what today is a nondescript corn field, where a small stone house once stood. For a few hours in 1851, that modest residence served as a flashpoint in America’s struggle over slavery.” (Smithsonian.com)

• The artist trying to put 1830s Creole New Orleans back into the artistic record. (New York Times)

• On DeFord Bailey. (Narratively)

• A founder of Gay’s the Word, a bookstore in London, has left his book collection to the University of London. (BBC News)

• Brenda Wineapple on how we should remember Edmund Ross: “As a weak person. As a profile in cowardice. He should be forgotten.” (Slate)

• How digital photography changed visits to the archive. (TheAtlantic.com)

• “Three centuries-old pre-Columbian sculptures that since the 1970s had been in Germany have been returned to Mexico voluntarily, officials said Thursday, the latest repatriation of cultural antiquities that has recently been gaining steam.” (Reuters)

• On the “only documented instance of blood libel—a persistent antisemitic canard in which Jews are accused of using Christians’ blood for a religious ritual, deployed as a pretext for persecuting Jews, most commonly in Europe—in the history of the United States.” (Jewish Currents)

• On Emma Willard’s infographics. (Public Domain Review)

• Excavating Ireland’s most notorious prison. (Archaeology)

• “This Lamb of God Had Some Work Done.” (The Cut)

• This week in obituaries: a python, a genius, a scholar of Middle Earth, the “keeper of the legacy of Pat the Bunny,” a White House plumber, a gum tycoon, a journalist, a news broadcaster, and a jazz saxophonist.