Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A lightning posting.

Encountered this morning on the New Scientist website from 12/15, what I saw as:

Ancient gnomes reveal
when modern humans and
Neanderthals interbred

I was picturing a wizened Ian McKellen gnome cackling over the sexual history of ancient hominids when it finally occurred to me that the image was preposterous, so I studied my screen more carefully. Oh … ancient genomes!

And then I wondered how gnomes got into it at all.

Not an accident, as it turns out. Not long before I saw the New Scientist piece, I’d come across a funny-sad photo of a garden gnome piled with wet snow (bad weather in the northeast US). So I was primed for gnomes.

This entry was posted on December 21, 2024 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Misreadings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.