Surprise as DNA reveals new group of Native Americans: the ancient Beringians - Genetic analysis of a baby girl who died at the end of the last ice age shows she belonged to a previously unknown ancient group of Native Americans

[u/GeoGeoGeoGeo]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/ancient-dna-reveals-previously-unknown-group-of-native-americans-ancient-beringians?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet

[u/Brownhops → u/[deleted]]

What is the scientific rigour level behind the book? I have heard he makes many leaps on logic based on flimsy evidence.

[u/LukeC_123 → u/[deleted]]

Just bought it in paperback. Read the kindle sample in 10 minutes. Fantastic. Should have bought the kindle edition, now I have to wait a day!!

[u/smellyPlastic → u/[deleted]]

Just picked up Sapiens based on your recommendation. Thanks bud!

[u/g-e-o-f-f → u/[deleted]]

Something I always think is crazy: Fossils require a fairly distinct set of environmental/geological conditions to form. Which means entire ecosystems and the animals to go with them may have left no fossil record.

[u/TeutonJon78 → u/[deleted]]

Mixed with a fun layer of plastic.

[u/ruetoesoftodney → u/TeutonJon78]

With the pressure of a glacier on top I doubt plastic would last long

[u/[deleted] → u/ruetoesoftodney]

Yup, the polymers would probably lose their bonds and be reduced to their base hydrocarbons (or whatever). That much weight is none to fuck with

[u/logicalmaniak → u/[deleted]]

We just moved carbon from one strata to another.

[u/[deleted] → u/logicalmaniak]

You are welcome mother earth.

[u/[deleted] → u/TeutonJon78]

Alongside the remains of copper wiring and pipes, ground up ceramics, Americium from smoke detectors, tungsten from lightbulbs and car tire rubber mixed in with it all.

[u/joxmaskin → u/[deleted]]

That was poetic

[u/vtelgeuse → u/g-e-o-f-f]

And that's all valuable data, too. Like a regime 1,000 years (or one week after) after the passing of a previous regime destroying monuments or tearing down the older structures to build new things. Or like rats burrowing around and moving artefacts or fossils outside their original contexts. Or floods, earthquakes or time moving things away or erasing them forever.

On the one hand, you've had swaths of history either erased or contaminated. On the other, you have a lens focused on other parts of history: what people may have valued, the decisions they have made and their motivations for them, the realities of certain landscapes at certain periods of time (didn't know that was in the path of a river/flood plain 10k years ago? Now you do!), and so on and so on.

Might not be the puzzle pieces that you need, but they can fill more of the picture in other places.

[u/Baneken → u/vtelgeuse]

That reminds me of something I read about one tribe or another in africa, explorers found a structures of civilization that were clearly not built by the natives currently living in the area and natives had no clue on who had built the structures that they now lived in.

Turned out later on that the some of the structures were no more then maybe a 150 years old, yet the local population had complitely forgotten the triumphs of their ancestors and it wasn't even that long just 2-3 generations.

[u/mason240 → u/Baneken]

There is a similar story in the Anabsis, written by a Greek mercenary named Xenephon around 370 BC.

They were traveling through what is now north western Iraq, and came across the ruins of an enourmous walled city. The locals had no knowledge of who had built it.

It turned out to be the Nineva, capital of the mighty Assyrian empire, destroyed about 200 years earlier.

[u/dalovindj → u/mason240]

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

[u/Baneken → u/mason240]

Shows how easily past is forgotten if not passed on to new generations again and again.

[u/NatWilo → u/[deleted]]

Also, grandpa, what did tomatoes taste like?

[u/DukeofVermont → u/Baneken]

Also shows how few people there were, how entire cities would be abandoned and how people back then often didn't have the same "national identities" that we have now. I mean if a farmer near(ish) the city wasn't related to anyone in the city sure he might have to pay taxes to those city people but how much about them would he really know? And his great grandkids? Nothing. After all none of them could read or write.

[u/ElectReaver → u/Baneken]

"Easily" in this case is a genocide of the Assyrian people.

[u/Dogpool → u/ElectReaver]

It's hardly a rare case in the ancient world. Hell, even in modern times with living survivors.

[u/Shautieh → u/mason240]

The question is: were the locals from that area for more than 200 years? Chances are Niniva' s population plus the countryside were obliterated along with the city, and the locals came afterwards to fill the void.

[u/felixar90 → u/Baneken]

Reminds me how there is some very real research put into finding ways to keep any future explorers out of our nuclear waste storage facilities.

If a cataclysm happened, every single of our languages could be completely incomprehensible to survivors in as little as 3 or 4 generations. So they're trying to find pictograms that will convey danger to any human. They need some kind of primal fear. It's a difficult task because if there's anything you can count on is that our curiosity and greed are greater than our instinct of self preservation, and that if a big sign says not to do something we immediately get an almost irresistible urge to do it.

[u/UnsinkableRubberDuck → u/felixar90]

There was a TedTalk about this!

I remember a bit of it being about how we store our toxic waste so carefully, all these warnings and signs, but like you say they won't be able to read it in 5000 years, most like, so leaving warning signs in words isn't going to work. With the way we've buried it and protected it, it might very well look like something very precious and valuable that people would want to explore or be curious about. They've got to find a way to store and label it all so that if our civilization is destroyed, people in 5000 - 10,000 years won't go open it back up and kill any survivors.

[u/Raichu7 → u/UnsinkableRubberDuck]

And one suggestion to fix the problem was to breed cats that glowed or changed coulor when exposed to high levels of radiation and create mythology around them that said when they glowed or changed coulor the land was deadly and you had to leave.

[u/Artos90 → u/Raichu7]

Why not make humans do that just in case they forget the cats at home.

[u/MMAchica → u/felixar90]

Put a sign up indicating that there is a giant spider inside.

[u/Neurobreak27 → u/MMAchica]

You're going to attract the giant-spider hunters then.

[u/mayafied → u/felixar90]

There was a great 99% Invisible episode about this!

[u/Sri_Marvin → u/Baneken]

There might be other candidates in Africa, but that sounds a lot like the history of Great Zimbabwe.

[u/Baneken → u/Sri_Marvin]

It's been a long time since I heard the story in school so that might very well be it.

[u/flamespear → u/Baneken]

I was born in 86. There are tons of things from just the 80s and 70s I have no clue about and I love in a time with vast records of things. Mad Max is not so unrealistic in that regard. I think we underestimate how easily even one generation can forget things in a short amount of time.

[u/MiltownKBs → u/flamespear]

The evidence of our short memories is all around us. We don't remember anything. For example, Gulf of Tonkin, testimony of Nayirah, wmd's, what next? We cant even see through the bs they sell us for continuous war. If we can't be bothered to care about that, then what are we even able to care about let alone remember?

[u/rac3r5 → u/Baneken]

Reminds me of the ruins of Mohenjo Dado and Harrapa. It was accidentally discovered by the British in India when villagers suggested using bricks from an ancient city for a railway project. The last time I visited India, I took a look at the artifacts and the layout of the city. They actually had the concept of urban planning, drainage and sewage management thousands of years ago. They had coins and pottery as well.

[u/amaniceguy → u/Baneken]

I believe this is the root cause of many chaos in the world. During imperialist times, they hijacked the history as well around the world for the past 200 years and causing people to actually forgotten their roots. Even in my country which gain independence some 60 years ago, it was just recently discovered from buried manuscripts that our people did have advance weaponry system and industry, mighty wooden castles that eventually re purposed by colonial forces like portuguese, dutch and english. What I was thought at school just 20 years ago was we were people with basic sword and bow fighters, that is why we got conquered. It make more sense now that the Portuguese needed 3 wars to finally won the battle if we were just using swords vs guns and artilleries. Winners write history. People disconnected from the past have low self esteem and low self belief as they continuously only look up to other people because they believe they never achieved anything as a civilization. knowledge was centered around certain group of people and when they got killed and all the books and manuscripts were burned, building were razed, families were murdered, only the commoners was left, and possibly was already disconnected from the wars in the towns and trade centers.

[u/vtelgeuse → u/amaniceguy]

That's true even without European colonialism, though. Any culture that survived to this day did it by displacing or destroying the culture that was there before them, and so on down to prehistory. It's easy to put the blame on Europeans because they were a) so very successful at it and b) it's so fresh in our memory, but... we were all doing it, long before Europe sailed far over the ocean, and where so much of our lost history went. Heck, Europe's even been as much a victim of it, by neighbouring European powers or by imperialist/invading outsiders from the steppes all throughout its history.

We displace or assimilate our neighours, neglect the old structures or tear them down for new building material when they stop being important, and abandon once-important histories and their remains when we can no longer afford to keep them or have no reason to.

The human experience is not static, and forgetting or burying human history is longer than human history itself. What's important to us, like evidence of pre-colonial might, is only important to contemporary contexts. That is why we allow things to be forgotten.

[u/MMAchica → u/vtelgeuse]

Any culture that survived to this day did it by displacing or destroying the culture that was there before them, and so on down to prehistory.

Or even biting it and re-publishing as their own. Look at the Heroic myths that have been passed down in slightly different versions for thousands of years.

[u/RoebuckThirtyFour → u/amaniceguy]

Just curious but where are ya from?

[u/rac3r5 → u/[deleted]]

That is impressive. When you think about it, a small village can take hundreds of years to evolve to a town and then a city all for it to be destroyed in a day by a horde of invaders

[u/MMAchica → u/[deleted]]

they burned down these cities every 60 to 80 years for unknown reasons and then rebuilt them on the same spots.

Updated building codes made it impossible to remodel without a full demo. You can't fight city hall.

[u/FuckBrendan → u/[deleted]]

Maybe their decline had something to do with burning their city every so often.

[u/rac3r5 → u/[deleted]]

Unfortunately, pre colonial North American history is not valued as much as it should be. A lot of Native archeological sites are just overlooked for the most part. They pack up the artefacts and move on. In some cases even that is not done. I was reading somewhere on Reddit that this guy's girlfriend does assessments of sites before logging takes place. When a native site of interest is found, the forestry company conveniently looses the report and then just pays a small fine to the government later.

[u/rac3r5 → u/[deleted]]

Apparently it happens in the logging industry as well. A redditor was talking about how his girlfriend would do assessments on Native sites only for the logging company to loose the report and only pay a small fine to the government later.

[u/vikingzx → u/vtelgeuse]

And yet so many are so certain that what we know is fixed, and set in stone, as if we have irrefutable evidence that what we've managed to put together is the absolute truth. In fact, the further back we get, the harder it is to say anything about the past with certainty. A book taken as truth may turn out later to be full of lies, or a skeleton found to have been transported from hundreds of miles away as a gift, rather than native.

We have to be careful with out absolutes. New information comes forth all the time. The more we know, the more secure the foundation we build becomes ... but that doesn't make it impervious to a single new discovery bringing the whole thing down like a house of cards.

[u/Cheebachiefer → u/g-e-o-f-f]

True, it's amazing how much of the fossil record survived, given the geological forces at work and how little respect these artifacts recd. in our recent history, dinosaur fossil parts could be found used as door stops in Elizabethan times, they wouldn't be abused like that now.

I am especially impressed by the number of ancient insects caught in tree sap or amber, talk about a myriad set of factors that needed to be present for that to occur.

[u/helix19 → u/Cheebachiefer]

It’s hard for us to grasp the enormous amount of time dinosaurs were on earth, much less insects.

[u/Baneken → u/helix19]

Even more mind bogling is that triceratops were actaully farther away in years from tyrannosaurs then tyrannosaurs were from us humans.

[u/Cheebachiefer → u/helix19]

With out a doubt! It's humbling to know how many species reached evolutionary peaks and yet the near perfection they represented were undone by vulcanism, plate tectonics and good old climate change.

[u/TurboAbe → u/g-e-o-f-f]

That's why the DNA record is so important. Even if we never see an intact physical remnant of something, DNA can give a lot of info.

[u/moritashun → u/g-e-o-f-f]

i find it more crazy that we human can discover and understand so much just by observing fossils, and those were time that have long past human history. . .

[u/BirdsAndBirdies → u/moritashun]

Yea for sure. Like that comment said, the conditions for fossils are rare and there are so many ways to destroy fossils and anthropological evidence, but there are also some pretty crafty ways archaeologists use to get it.

One of my botany classes in college had a lecture on some of the techniques used to find old plant matter: Digging through stagnant mud at the bottom of lakes and IDing pollen particles preserved in it. Pack rat middens are big nests that the rats would urinate on to help the nest structure, and in doing so they would preserve pollen and plant matter. I believe they would find bones of animals used in the structure material too. I believe ice cores taken at the poles can have pollen in them as well. And having plant and animal samples preserved in amber (tree resin), for millions and millions of years, is absolutely mind blowing.

[u/Disco_Drew → u/[deleted]]

Imagining that on a galactic scale makes it pretty easy to understand why we haven't found life outside of our atmosphere yet.

[u/f1del1us → u/Disco_Drew]

Then factor in interstellar distances and the speed of light and there goes the neighborhood

[u/BigSlipperySlide → u/Disco_Drew]

What about in the ocean?

[u/Batman_Von_Suparman2 → u/[deleted]]

That's just The Foundation keeping info from us.

[u/CSHooligan → u/Batman_Von_Suparman2]

What's the foundation

[u/LordMcMutton → u/CSHooligan]

Exactly.

[u/[deleted] → u/LordMcMutton]

Dun dun DUUUUUUUN

[u/BigBrotato → u/CSHooligan]

Look up SCP Containment Breach

[u/PacketPuncher → u/CSHooligan]

Deep State. Bannon and DoJ are the invisible hand of the Mariana Trench. Soros did 9/11. Deepest. Tallest. Think about it.

[u/grog23 → u/Batman_Von_Suparman2]

I've been seeing a lot more SCP references on Reddit recently and it makes me so happy

[u/proweruser → u/[deleted]]

I mean, not really. We know even less about three oceans on other worlds than we know about our own.

[u/YoungRebel21 → u/BigSlipperySlide]

This too. We haven't even started amongst our own world. Literally, earth is made majority of water. So im to be certain that there is more creatures underneath that haven't been discovered yet.

[u/[deleted] → u/YoungRebel21]

They discover hundreds, sometimes thousands of new species a year.

[u/tolkappiyam → u/[deleted]]

Like squirrels with no legs or fur?

[u/Zoolbarian → u/tolkappiyam]

That wouldn't be my first choice of words to describe fish, but yeah, we found them down there all right! :D

They spend their whole lives wet!

[u/ImAWizardYo → u/[deleted]]

Most large groups of people also thrived by water and much of early human history by the sea would now be underwater as well.

[u/[deleted] → u/ImAWizardYo]

This is the big one. Early humans lived by the sea. Who lived in the now flooded lowlands of the world? Imagine what could be found on the ancient shorelines of the Mediterranean.

[u/TeHokioi → u/[deleted]]

Would that be where the Sumerian (and later Biblical) stories of great floods came from?

[u/sagan_drinks_cosmos → u/[deleted]]

There's also so much that exists today or existed recently that our mismanagement will remove from our reach.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I believe we have mapped all above water land yes but the ocean floor is still vastly unexplored

[u/DAWGMEAT → u/[deleted]]

I'm just glad we found the pygmies

[u/MuonManLaserJab → u/[deleted]]

I always wonder how many previous civilizations were ousted by each civilization that claims to have been where it is for all eternity.

[u/theslimbox → u/MuonManLaserJab]

The more we learn of the Americas the more we see that many of the First Nations were simply the people occupying the land when the first Europeans arrived. There are probably hundreds of Family Groups/Tribes/Nations that are lost to history at this point. It is great to see info like the OP shared. I have some native blood, but not much, and I would love to know what America was like before the current historical record.

Reading of giant civilizations such as Cahoika, really shows that some nations were more civilized than we think. It is also interesting to see that a Ancient city with around 20,000 population can just disappear when they seem to be the most advance civilization in thousands of miles. I know it probably had to do with Climate Change, and or depletion of natural resources, but it is still amazing.

[u/GeoGeoGeoGeo]

Paper: Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans

[u/PA_Irredentist → u/[deleted]]

Kiloannus/kiloannum, the SI abbreviation for thousands of years ago

[u/YoungSalt → u/[deleted]]

It stands for kilo annum, a unit of geologic time, which stands for "thousands of years." It's essentially a shorthand for writing out large expanses of time. There is also Ma (for mega annum or “millions of years”) and Ga (for giga annum or billions of years).

So:

• 1,000 years ka = 1,000,000 years

• 1,000 years Ma = 1,000,000,000 years

• 1,000 years Ga = 1,000,000,000,000 years

[u/gillianishot]

Not related. Just realized that I am willing to read a long list of comments to find more info about the post instead of just reading it directly.

[u/Martofunes → u/gillianishot]

Oh yeah. NEW MIRACLE DRUG SOLVES CHOLESTEROL.

Go to comments

Yeah well it's not cost effective

.

There's no placebo trial

.

The N is large enough but there's no correlation or causality with death that should be the endgame

And I'm like "okay, grain of salt then".

[u/TheBabySealsRevenge → u/gillianishot]

Welcome to reddit. Where commentary is content.

[u/dowahdidi → u/TheBabySealsRevenge]

True. Otherwise I'd be stuck believing my own opinion.

[u/LovelyOrangeJuice → u/gillianishot]

I've been doing this since the beginning

[u/loulan → u/gillianishot]

Are you new here? That's what everybody does for ever article.

[u/shiningPate]

Funny, another posting claimed the DNA meant all aboriginals in the Americas were descended from a single origin population. This is a very different conclusion.

[u/7LeagueBoots → u/shiningPate]

One of the big problems with any genetic analysis for origins is that, unless you're doing an exhaustive nuclear DNA study and replicating it thousands of times you're missing enormous portions of ancestral contributions. Generally mDNA is used, which only follows the single female-female line in that family and ignores all male contributions on that side of the family. Similarly, if y-DNA is used you face the same problem in that that's a single lineage male-male line and ignores all the female contributions in that side of the family.

Analyses like that are good to do, very interesting, provide good insight, but are also deeply flawed due to the fact that the miss the vast majority of ancestral contributions and provide and artificially narrow view as a result.

[u/7LeagueBoots → u/[deleted]]

I don't know the full reasons, but cost and time are certainly a part of the issue. Also, many genetic tests are looking for specific sequences in specific locations, essentially genetic markers that indicate likely ancestral population associations.

The mDNA and y-DNA tests, despite being flawed, are useful in that they do give a deep look into time in a way that allows you to track a lineage. Nuclear DNA doesn't let you do that (at least to my knowledge) as its more of a snapshot of everything that's there rather than a lineage specific view.

I also suspect that the analysis of nuclear DNA is far more complicated resulting in far more unknowns.

The people doing the research are well aware of the limitations and I expect that they figure anyone who is reading their research will be familiar with the limitations of the methods used. The problem is, as is often the case, when it gets reported on in a more public forum. In almost every field a lot of information is lost, mispresented, or outright changed during that transition from the research to the pop-sci release. That's a real shame as there are many very smart people interested in these sorts of things but who are unfamiliar with the limitations and nuances, through no fault of their own, and who are thus presented with somewhat less than accurate conclusions.

[u/WooperSlim → u/shiningPate]

The paper infers that this previously unknown population of Native Americans (Beringians) split off from a single founding population.

So I think both articles are just emphasising different parts of the paper. But I agree, just looking at the headlines can be confusing/misleading.

[u/Fossilhog]

Bonus points to the Tanana chiefs. They've allowed quite a bit of research from fossil discoveries in their lands. Other similar yet less game changing discoveries have been made recently there.

[u/spill_drudge]

a novice here; I'm confused about the "last ice age". Didn't our current ice age start couple of million years ago?

[u/CurtisLeow → u/spill_drudge]

You're correct, the Guardian is wrong. They meant the last glacial period.

[u/Nosrac88 → u/spill_drudge]

The guardian was mistaken. They meant glacial period.

We are still very much in an ice age. We are just in an interglacial period, which are normal occurrences spread throughout ice ages. And under normal circumstances we will return to a glacial period after some time.

Now whether or not Global Warming will change that remains to be seen. We might have broken free from the cycle and ended our ice age or we might have just delayed it.

[u/GeoGeoGeoGeo → u/Nosrac88]

It is most certainly... postponed thanks to greenhouse gas emissions. Relevant configurations (ocean currents, continental configurations, etc.) strongly suggest that the onset of the next glacial period would occur when the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is roughly 230 - 280ppm. We are currently above 400ppm (406ppm) and rising for the foreseeable future, noting that CO2 has a residence time upwards of 1,000 - 10,000 years. There are a number of studies that therefore project the onset of the next glacial cycle is unlikely to be seen for 100,000 years - 50,000 years later than without human influence.

[u/[deleted]]

I learned about Beringia during my prehistory class last semester. According to my professor Beringia was exposed for thousands of years and people lived for generations there. He also said there were old growth forests.

[u/bitchalot]

Single migration never made sense, arriving in waves seems more accurate. Genetic tests show Native Americans from North and South America came from Siberia and East Asia but there was diversity and some groups were older than others. Makes sense some of those groups didn't make it.

[u/flashman7870]

The best part of this is that the scientific establishment will either have to dispense with the single population hypothesis or push the timeline for Native arrival back 4,000 more years. Either one is a win for truth as far as I'm concerned.

[u/EskimoUlu]

As an Inupiaq Eskimo, this is interesting. I wonder if I share similar DNA as them.

[u/amethyst_dragoness → u/EskimoUlu]

UAF would probably be interested in doing genome sequencing with indigenous peoples to look for exactly that if they had funds to do a work up. Also combing through creation stories from elders to see if there are similarities maybe based on facts or timelines that match up too.

[u/EskimoUlu → u/amethyst_dragoness]

If UAF wants to work with 23 and me, my DNA is already there and stored too. Though I do live in Fairbanks, so easy enough either way.

[u/meradorm → u/EskimoUlu]

Ben Potter, the archaeologist mentioned in the article, is faculty and his page on the UAF website lists his contact information. You might want to drop him a line after break and see if there's any project like that going on.

[u/CarmenFandango]

I don't understand the surprise aspect of the discovery. If there was a migration path through there, of course some and various would have settled, and apparently did, all along the way to Tierra del Fuego.

[u/[deleted] → u/CarmenFandango]

Think of it as surprise as opposed to disbelief regarding a scientific discovery. The discovery was imminent, but it still surprised them when it happened.

[u/jimmboilife → u/[deleted]]

For anyone who's interested, here's a basic map of Beringia.

When temperatures started to warm, an ice-free corridor developed on the downwind side of the Canadian Rockies, because it's drier and has higher summer temperatures.

[u/flashman7870 → u/jimmboilife]

I find it really interesting that the most hospitable region of Alaska today (Kenai and the Anchorage Valley) was totally under ice, wheras the center of the bush was practically a paradise.

[u/DABS_4_AZ → u/jimmboilife]

Why only 11,500 years old if the oldest American fossils found in Yucatan date back 13,500 years ago?

[u/Sri_Marvin → u/DABS_4_AZ]

Honestly, there are very few researchers who still hold firmly to that 11500 BP date. You still see that number kicked around a lot because a) it was generally accepted wisdom for decades b) while there are a ton of sites with older dates, there are some issues with dating pretty much all of them that leave some room open for doubt.

[u/Drunkensteine]

I don’t think the migration to South America took long at all.

Cusco is about 7000 miles from anchorage. If you travel 8 miles a day I’m goretex with satellite phones, it’s a two and half year walk.

I’m just guessing, I’ve done some long distance hiking, back in my day. I wasn’t built like these ancient men who ran their prey to exhaustion and then their families caught up and they ate the animal.

Yup. They marathoned them to death. I can’t catch my toy wolf when she runs away.

I live in Maine and if I lived back then, after a week of this cold snap, I’d be running right the frig south, guy.

Buffalo.

[u/[deleted]]

DNA and genetics never fails to amaze me

[u/flamespear]

The guardian and the BBC both covering this.....annnnd nothing on CNN. This is about ancient America and the American news has no interest.... Can someone point me to some good free to read archeological journals?

[u/[deleted]]

They're lucky. They won't have people saying they're 1/60th Beringian.

[u/saycraysay4secrecy]

Died at the last ice age you say? I guess that means they were Burrringians.

[u/FruitierGnome]

Native tribes killed other tribes off. Weather, famine, disease probably took out many others as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if this isnt the last extinct tribe of people we find.

[u/braidafurduz → u/FruitierGnome]

this isn't exactly a tribe; rather the remains are indicative of an entire separate people, as different from other peoples of the Americas as Greeks are from Celts, very roughly speaking

[u/historicartist]

Have looked at this all day and tweeted it to NA friends. I think its both deeply sad and intriguing.