The Browser - Ape Tree

Self-Domesticated Ape

Kevin Kelly | Technium | 2nd March 2025

The first animals domesticated by humans weren’t dogs, but ourselves. Humanity selected for rounder faces, wider eyes, and broadly the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Human evolution is a story of Survival of the Friendliest. "We self-selected our character, and crafted this being called human. We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention" (1,500 words)

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The Walnut Tree

David Blake Knox | Dublin Review Of Books | 4th March 2025

Survivors of a massacre in Croatia identify the man who directed it: the town’s mayor. He has eight sworn alibi witnesses and a video with a burnt-in time-code showing him elsewhere. Except that a Czech detective, an English silviculturist, and the angles on the branches of a walnut tree collectively prove that the video had been doctored: at the crucial moment he was driving in to town, not out (2,000 words)

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