What Happened to the Ancients of Easter Island?

Easter Island's inhabitants used up all their resources and eventually died out -- a lesson for us all.

75 Years of Band-Aid

FROM THE WEBSITE: My wife and I bought an old house in Northern California in December of 1994. We bought it from friends, and in fact the great-grandfather of my buddy Mitch built the house himself. It's about 50 years old, and pretty groovy in its own way. It seems that Mitch's family didn't like to throw anything away. They saved pretty much everything they could - when we moved in, the garage (which never had been cleaned out. It still hasn't) looked like a storage closet. Small things, they stored in Band-Aid boxes. Stuff like nails, washers, bolts...anything that could possibly be reused. We must have unearthed two dozen boxes dating back to the 1950's. A few years after the owners died, Mitch moved in. But he's a bit of a slob, so the Band-Aid boxes remained unmolested until we arrived. What could I do, but share our found bit of history with you?

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Last survivor of 'unsinkable' Titanic dies at 97

Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean

LONDON – Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died Sunday, having been the last survivor of 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic.

She was 97 years old, and she died where she had lived — in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.

She died in her sleep early Sunday, her friend Gunter Babler told the Associated Press. It was the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable."

Babler said Dean's longtime companion, Bruno Nordmanis, called him in Switzerland to say staff at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton discovered Dean in her room Sunday morning. He said she had been hospitalized with pneumonia last week but she had recovered and returned to the home.

A staff nurse at the nursing home said late Sunday that no one would comment until administrators came on duty Monday morning.

Dean just over 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.

Dean was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

Babler, who is head of the Switzerland Titanic Society, said Dean was a "very good friend of very many years."

"I met her through the Titanic society but she became a friend and I went to see very every month or so," he said.

The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-paneled smoking room, a swimming pool and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from the English port of Southampton for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives.

Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 600 kilometers (380 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of its supposedly watertight compartments.

Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us — because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998.

Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.

"She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later," Dean said in 2002. "I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia."

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.

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Destination: Scandal from the Washington Post

From sexual peccadilloes to Cold War conspiracies, we bring you Washington's more entertaining, more human, more seamy side. We've also compiled the Post stories that covered -- and in many cases exposed -- the scandals. Our curious observation: almost every sex scandal results in a tell-all memoir. We'll give you the book titles for your next trip to the library.

The two tours that follow will take you to the list of homes, office buildings and offices that make up Washington's Worst Addresses. Locations marked with the are within easy walking distance in downtown Washington, so you can take a short detour from your trip to the White House or the Smithsonian to check out some or all of these infamous sites. Or join local comedy group Gross National Product for the official Scandal Tours bus trip.

Let the gawking begin!

Neanderthals' grisly fate: devoured by humans

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.

The idea will provoke considerable opposition from scientists who believe Neanderthals disappeared for reasons that did not involve violence. Neanderthals were a sturdy species who evolved in Europe 300,000 years ago, made complex stone tools and survived several ice ages before they disappeared 30,000 years ago - just as modern human beings arrived in Europe from Africa.

Some researchers believe Neanderthals may have failed to compete effectively with Homo sapiens for resources, or were more susceptible to the impact of climate change. But others believe our interactions were violent and terminal for the Neanderthals. According to Rozzi, the discovery at Les Rois in south-west France provides compelling support for that argument.

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ALSO, SEE: "Unravelling the DNA of our ancient relatives"

Ssshhh... don't tell those just-a-little-bit-strange folks who think humans and dinosaurs lived together starting only 6,000 years ago.