This is surely worthy of SOME sort of comment…but what?

One has to wonder if this was the result of peer-reviewed research. If so, I’m not sure I want to visualize the procedure involved.

Lost? Manhood overboard, everybody

It’s just a solitary foot bone, but it suggests that people were navigating the world’s oceans tens of thousands of years earlier than had been thought. And, according to some experts, they did so – truly – by the seat of their pants.

The bone, found on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, suggests that humans got there at least 67,000 years ago, crossing open sea long before we have any direct evidence that people knew how to build boats or sail them. And even older stone tools have been discovered on other Pacific islands, which – like Luzon – were surrounded by water even when sea levels were some 360 feet lower, at the peak of the last ice age.

But how on earth did prehistoric people find what are often just specks in the world’s biggest ocean? Some years ago I came across a man who thought he knew. Samoan meteorologist Penehuro Lefale told an international conference that they did it because they had balls.

Helmsmen, he said, would hang over the side of their rafts and trail their scrotums in the water, using the most sensitive parts of their bodies to pick up changes in water temperature.

“If the water was becoming colder, their testicles would shrink and they knew they were moving away from land,” he went on. “If the water was warmer, they knew land was near.”

We’ve long been told that letting it all hang out makes us feel more pacific, but I never envisaged anything like this.

Hmmmm. Does this explain the presence of what appears to be bovine testicular organs observed on the back of some cattle trucks? An enhancement to the use of GPS perhaps? Something to think about? Nah.