October digest: archaeology, Paris exhibitions, protests in France and museum news

In Pushkin's “Autumn” the grove sheds its last leaves; in France this October it was rather shop windows and town halls that were being shaken, and since this coincided with my customary Parisian holiday, a good part of the month in the channel passed to the sound of demonstrations. In the digest, as usual, I gather the best of the previous thirty days. So, here is the main material from the channel for October 🍂

Archaeology and the origins of humankind ⛏️ On the skulls of people buried beside the tombs of the first pharaohs at Abydos, traces of violent death were found. Neanderthals may have treated themselves with birch tar; at Schöningen a macaque milk tooth 310,000 years old was studied, the northernmost evidence of macaques living in Europe. The footprints of people at White Sands were dated to between 23,500 and 21,700 years ago. Off the island of Kekova the oldest shipwreck in the Mediterranean was found, 4,400 to 4,700 years old. A resident of the Nile Delta found colossal statues of Ramesses II on his own plot of land. The Maya went on living in Aké for hundreds of years after the collapse of the city. In Alexandria a ring with the lighthouse was raised, and in Pompeii a cupboard with a child's necklace of amulets.

Exhibitions 🖼 The Louvre is showing Zurbarán, and beside his paintings I met Rossi de Palma. The Fondation Louis Vuitton has devoted an exhibition to the collector and artist Gustave Fayet, who turned chance blots into flowers and carpets. At the Musée Jacquemart-André the first complete retrospective in France of Tintoretto is under way, while the Orsay, a hundred years after the death of Mary Cassatt, has staged her first major retrospective in a French national museum. The Bakhrushin Museum has brought to Yaroslavl an exhibition about Zimin, who took over the inheritance of Mamontov's opera. At Fontainebleau an exhibition has opened on the stays at the château of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The market and museums 🏛 Art Basel Paris sold works for almost 130 million euros and closed early because of the protests. At Issoire a 150-kilogram bronze cover of Dalí's “Book of the Apocalypse” was stolen. The French are arguing over whether the Bayeux Tapestry was damaged in London. An “Enigma” machine was sold at Bonhams for more than 200,000 pounds. The museums of Milwaukee and St Petersburg put a Monet at stake in a baseball wager. In 1984 in Livorno heads by Modigliani were pulled out of a canal, one of which students had carved with an electric drill for a joke. The Mausoleum is listed as a fixed asset, and the channel wondered how to account for Lenin himself.

Heritage and the streets 🔥 In Saint Petersburg the Miller mansion burned down on Saint Isaac's Square. Protesters set fire to the town hall of Limoges of 1883 and broke into the Colosseum, while students blocked the entrance to the Louvre on the side of the École du Louvre. At Hagia Sophia foreigners now pay 25 euros and see the church only from the gallery.

Theatre, cinema and literature 🎞 Asafyev's “The Flames of Paris” was staged for the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. Martin McDonagh has made Wild Horse Nine with Malkovich and Rockwell. We recalled Bunin's Nobel speech, the first émigré among the laureates. Vodolazkin burns the plague rags in the very place where he cooks his food, and Casper in the first cartoon reads Carnegie.

Church and power 💒 The remains of Athanasius of Orlovsky were recognised as relics. The Church of England is advised to reduce the number of dioceses to about 30. About a quarter of Orthodox Christians in the USA came to the faith as adults. Leo XIV voted by post in the American midterm elections. On the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi in New York animals were blessed.

Empires and memory 🏰 The Wat Tyler rising of 1381 grew out of the plague and the poll tax. For dekulakisation there is still no agreed count of victims. A mural in Tomsk has raised once more the question of whether Fyodor Kuzmich was Alexander I. Daguerre in 1838 photographed people for the first time on the Boulevard du Temple. On 14 October 1793 the jurors of Marie Antoinette were told that “the people's vengeance” was in their hands.

Science 👨🏼‍🔬 A model from the Weizmann Institute reconstructs an image from your thoughts using an fMRI scan. On the steps of an ordinary apartment-block entrance, fossils of sea lilies 350 million years old turned up 📌