After our last post, we wanted to try out the Paleo Diet near headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Look what they dug up from the world famous La Brea Tar Pits (Wikipedia) at the Page Museum! This is right next to the LACMA art museum, where we photographed the sunset over the Levitated Mass sculpture, one of our all-time most-liked photographs to date (when this was originally posted as an IG post). In addition to ancient mammoth fossils and giant pet rock art exhibits, there also are Picassos and Rembrandts in the same city block. (But apparently no Vermeer, although they did show the Vermeer documentary we discussed earlier. This is also a photographic follow-up to our earlier, much more serious Woolly Mammoth post on 11,000-year-old prehistoric art and preserving extinct species’s DNA.)
Unfortunately, none of the restaurants nearby serve mammoth (and the ubiquitous Starbucks across the street from the mammoth’s bones also was out of their usual cold, shrink-wrapped mammoth sandwiches). It seems we began our startup several thousand years too late to try out the caveman diet, as the mammoth has been extinct for at least that long. And remains extinct, at lest for now (more on this in a future post).
You might not realize this, but LA is a long way from France. So we are guessing that this was a different mammoth than the one the cave dude artist drew 11,000 years ago for our last post, when mammoths were still on the menu. There are actually many species of mammoths, so this might not even be the same species. Apparently they were very, very common, roaming both near our offices in California as well as covering Europe. Well, they were, until our ancestors became a little too fond of the paleo diet.
Palettes have evolved over the millennia, so we’re not sure if we’d even like mammoth. (It’s definitely not vegan. It’s red #meat, probably high in cholesterol. Then again, almost no one lived much past 30 in those days.) But our ancestors apparently really liked them, even without garlic.
What does all this have to do with data? Well, as we mentioned in our last post, the sequences of a number of mammoth species have been sequenced. This means we can now do some archaeology with data, a topic we’ll be revisiting in future posts. (In case you’re wondering how this all impacts us today, we’ll have an explanation of that as well.)
Photo credit: (C) Acculation
A version of this post and photo (with different cropping) first appeared in our IG feed.