John Keats feared he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain, «before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain»

John Keats feared he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain, «before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain». Our concern is rather that, amid the informational din, the important things of the month should not get lost. Hence the regular digest: the key publications worth committing to memory for the future.

Archaeology and the origins of humankind 🧑🏻‍🔬 takes up much of my attention, because I have returned to my dissertation research. In the South African cave of Wonderwerk, charred bones have pushed back the date of the mastery of fire to around a million years ago. In the teeth of hunter-gatherers from the Baikal region, researchers found the plague bacillus, 5,500 years old: the earliest outbreak of plague in history, four thousand years before Justinian's. And from the walls of caves in Spain and Portugal, human DNA has been extracted for the first time without bones or teeth, from a calcite crust formed by the touch of an artist's hand. Hugh Groucutt, meanwhile, is disputing the dogma of the "cognitive revolution".

Art and its fate 🖼, as the calling card of the channel, remains in focus: from Correggio's "Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine", the most expensive painting of the seventeenth century, to Chagall's panels painted for a hall that no longer exists, and the red stripes in a cave, recognised as the oldest art in Britain.

Restoration and heritage 🏛 The Acropolis restoration service has completed the west pediment of the Parthenon. The Vatican has announced a five-year restoration of Raphael's Loggia. A French court has permitted the Bayeux Tapestry to travel to the British Museum contrary to the experts' findings on its fragility. And in Russia, historical and cultural expert review has been removed from the approval of restoration projects.

The market and money 💰 A small panel, "Hell", by a follower of Bosch went for 537 thousand. An amber pendant, bought by an anonymous buyer for £5,588 as an old trinket, proved after attribution to be a Renaissance jewel bearing a portrait of Elizabeth I. The former head of Art Basel laments that the young buy bitcoin instead of pictures.

Church and power ⛪️ Leo XIV consecrated the tower of the Sagrada Família, and during his visit to a divided Spain he called for an escape from the logic of the image of the enemy. In Texas, biblical texts have been added to the compulsory school reading list.

Empires and knowledge 🏰 A merchant vessel found at a depth of 600 metres, with Chinese porcelain aboard, offers a cross-section of the trade of the late Baroque. In the epistolary duels since the correspondence of Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky, it turns out, the calculation on the public and the judgement of posterity has not changed. Meanwhile the post office of the United Kingdom operates in English and Welsh, although the country has no official language, and parliamentary acts are confirmed by royal assent in Norman French.

Science and its mores 🦸🏽 Vasily Belokurov has shown that the constancy of the starry sky is an optical illusion the length of a lifetime. The physicist Carlo Rovelli has published a book not about physics but against rearmament: "85 Seconds to Midnight".

Nature and history 🌿 The label "non-native" opens the way for a species to complete destruction, or eradication. In Kolomenskoye, Sakhalin knotweed has been seizing Golosov Ravine for thirty years, and under the "improvement" programme nothing has yet been done about it. In the Etruscan-Roman Cetamura near Chianti, it emerged that a single grape variety was cloned vegetatively for more than three hundred and sixty years running. The first millipedes crawled onto land 460 million years ago, 80 million years before the vertebrates, into a world without a single tree or leaf, while in Burmese amber an ant 100 million years old has turned up, with a triangular head and eyes that looked backwards.

Such was June: humankind proved once again older and more complex than in the textbooks, restorers go on saving monuments, the market pines for money, and the authorities, here and across the ocean alike, are once more at odds with culture.