Side notes on European "uses" of mummies in 16th / 17th centuries . . . "mummy brown" is a paint originally made with substances + ground-up-mummy-corpses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown) . . . people ate mummy-flesh-based concoctions as medicine (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-o...).

Wow, it blows my mind that dried human flesh was ground up to make paint. More about it here:

http://www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brow...

Fascinating read. Thanks for posting.

The 'Sign up for email alerts' notice sparked quite the dissonance in me! A great read.

Direct link: http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/84/177.full.p...

pls add [pdf] to title

why is this relevant to hacker news?

Anything of intellectual interest is fair game, and historical material is particularly welcome.

When considering what's relevant to HN, make sure you've read the first paragraph of the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you could almost have this as a macro the question occurs often enough :-P

Man, the guidelines say "Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

Good hackers like Egyptology in general? WTF

When presented with something unexpected, you will be much happier and much more successful if you focus on figuring out what's interesting about it, than if you focus on complaining about why it shouldn't be there. Alternately, just ignore it.

Pretty much the only thing you shouldn't ever do is make a public statement about "why is X on Y?". That's really the only way you lose.

Source: decades of reading digital forums. Also, life. The same lessons apply equally well to adult life in general. Seriously, no good will ever come of asking this question, anywhere, ever.

Why is the North Korea opposition in the gulags? Why is there so much homeless people in SF streets? Why is this shitty piece of code here?

According to mwfunk, we would be happier in figuring out what's interesting about that or ignore it.

"When presented with something unexpected, you will be much happier and much more successful if you focus on figuring out what's interesting about it, than if you focus on complaining about why it shouldn't be there. Alternately, just ignore it."