The Conservative Cave

PALMETTO, Florida, May 14 (Reuters) – Police in Florida are investigating vandalism at a historic, predominantly African American cemetery where 17 gravesites were damaged, with headstones knocked down and “Trump” and “DeSantis” spray-painted in red letters on tombs, referring to the U.S. politicians. 

Detectives believe the incident in Palmetto, a town around 31 miles (50 km) south of Tampa on Florida’s west coast, occurred within the past few weeks. No arrests have been made and the investigation continues, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Tuesday.

Glenn Searls, 77, said on Wednesday he felt “extreme anger” at the vandalism at the Old Memphis Cemetery, where members of his family, and others he knows, are buried.

“When you look and you see ‘DeSantis’ and ‘Trump’ spray-painted on a vault, it makes you wonder if it’s politically motivated, and I tend to believe it is,” Searls said of damage to the cemetery established in 1904 for Black residents of Palmetto’s Memphis neighborhood.

Around 60,000 years ago in Siberia, a Neanderthal opened their mouth so that a rotten tooth could be drilled — and the case is the oldest evidence of an intentional dental treatment to date, a new study finds.

A lower molar tooth belonging to a Neanderthal adult was originally unearthed in 2016, but it was not clear what had caused the deep hole in its surface. Now, experimental evidence indicates the hole was made with a small stone drill used to clean out bits of severely rotten tooth tissue, according to a study published Wednesday (May 13) in the journal PLOS One.

This intricate procedure shows Neanderthals — our closest human relatives who lived from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago — had the brains to recognize this painful tooth cavity could be treated and possessed the fine motor skills to successfully execute the procedure.

"The fact that this invasive treatment took place and the person survived lends me to believe that this is another example of the really very sophisticated Neanderthal understanding of human biology and when you need to intervene," study co-author John W. Olsen, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Arizona, told Live Science.