Prehistory Museum at Greenwich and a 2021 Discovery 1/8/21

Some years back in the vigorous days of my early retirement, I made many many visits to the Prehistory Museum in Greenwich, New Jersey. I strongly urge anyone who has the time to go there and visit! I went there so many times over a long period that a couple of the men I spoke with have already died, but, the day I remember most was the day a local fisherman brought in the molar of a wooly mammoth. What a day! To get to hold so ancient and fantastic an object in my hands! Somewhere back in my photos on this site is a picture of it. The fisherman wanted to sell it to the men at the museum but the exhibits of the museum were entirely donated and they had no budget for purchasing things. The small amounts they raised from donations and so on barely covered the electric bills and I don't know how they covered the taxes but probably tax exempt status and maybe grants. Anyhow I loved that museum so much that I actually went fossil hunting with a man I met there who knew a place along the Delaware and bay where many fossils had been found. We didn't find any that day and now I can't even remember his name. He was a volunteer at the museum also.

The way the rich sediment of experience layers itself with acquired knowledge from reading - Today I was reading a favorite magazine DISCOVER, and there were three articles of interest to me on DNA. One was about wooly mammoth dna found in Siberia. Another was dna found in the dirt sidement layers in feces in caves inhabited by Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens. This new level of technological ability, to extract dna from fossil feces opens a whole new field of studies because ancient cave dirt is far more easy to find than bones!

It occurred to me when I was reading these articles that my youth is from the days BEFORE dna was discovered!!! My youth was before so many things we take for granted today - cell phones, internet, computers, cable tv, dna and genetic testing, satelites! And I am sure if I thought about it long enough I would think of even more - in my youth most cars were still stick shift!

Although we officially designaate 2003 as the eyar the human genome was sequenced after more than a decade of painstaking work, about 8% was still not able to be sequenced by the technology of that time. TLast year, 2021, the job was finally completed thanks to the work of a consortium of scienties Telomere to Telomere or T2T.

The other article I read was about the use of dna and fmily history sites such as GED and ancestry.com and 23 and Me in solving crimes by using dna from murder scenes and dna in thee family hisotry web sites. There is a controversa raging over whether this constitutes an invasion of privacy. I am for open source. The only ones that I can see who have had anything to lose from this blend of efforts are killers and rapists. Do they have a lobby?

Happy Trails! and Happy New Year! Jo Ann

Sorry - it was a mastodon molar not at mammoth!