Hello!!

More than twenty years ago, when I was in school, I was taught that the people of Rapanui (Easter Island) were a textbook case of a people who over-exploited their environment leading to a complete societal collapse. This version of events has been stuck in my head ever since, mostly as a cautionary tale—proof that a society that does not care for the land it occupies cannot last.

Piece by piece, and without me knowing it, over the last 20 years that version of the story has been disproven from a number of angles. Certainly, the society of people on Rapanui changed between when it was first established around the year 1200 and when Europeans first saw it in the 1700s, but every piece of evidence indicates that the collapse of that society happened after contact with Europeans, not before it. That collapse was caused first by the introduction of new disease, and later by regular slave raiding. This version of events was re-emphasized this week by a genomic analysis of ancient deceased individuals published in the journal Nature.

But this is just another piece of evidence in a string that has challenged the traditional narrative of what happened on Rapanui, which you can learn about in this absolutely tremendous video from the "Fall of Civilizations" YouTube video. I should've watched it years ago. There is indeed much to learn from Rapanui, it just isn't the lessons we thought.

COMPLETELY UNRELATEDLY

Pizzamas begins in about a week!! I will be sending out truly terrible dad jokes via push notifications on the Pizzamas App which you can get on iPhone or Android. You should just go ahead and download them now because I think there may be...a few pre-Pizzamas jokes as well :-)

Hank

You can always email us at [email protected]

This Week in Stuff

• The Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City celebrated its cat mascot Indiana Bones’ 5th Gotcha Day.

• Sage the Bad Naturalist taught us soggy rock facts to dazzle our enemies (and newsletter readers).

• There’s a lighthouse map that depicts where lighthouses are, what color their light is, and how far their light reaches.

• Hank answered a very enthusiastic question about worms.

• You can spell your name (or other words) using land satellite imagery.

  

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

HIV antiretroviral therapy saves over a million lives each year

Saloni Dattani

Four decades ago, when HIV was first identified, it was an invariably fatal disease: nearly 100% of those infected died, typically within a few years.

The virus spread rapidly around the world — especially in Africa, where almost two million were dying every year by the millennium.

Thankfully, medical advances and global public health efforts have entirely changed this course. Modern antiretroviral therapy is very effective in both treating HIV — returning people with HIV to near-normal life expectancy — and preventing the virus from spreading to others.

The chart above shows this impact based on data from UNAIDS. Over a million people's lives are now saved by antiretroviral therapy each year.

Recent medical advances could take this progress even further.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

This Week at Complexly

We worked with toy designer David Silva of Creative Beast Studio on these 1/18th scale, articulated figures that were built using data from the latest scientific discoveries and painted with colors inspired by modern-day creatures living in similar environments. Transport the engaging, educational content from Eons directly into your hands with these woolly mammoths!

When you back today, you help us get to our stretch goals faster, which include more creatures, more colors, and more excitement! This is a crowd-funding campaign, meaning we can only make these figures if we hit our goal. We hope you're excited— we sure are!

Study Hall College Journeys is back with a new episode featuring YouTube pioneer and comedy powerhouse, Grace Helbig! Before Grace became one of the first creators to build a career on YouTube, she explored every opportunity she could in college, including competing in a Miss New Jersey pageant just to see if she'd hate it! Her years at Ramapo laid the foundation for an impressive career in entertainment, and her story serves as a reminder that pursuing what excites you can lead to transformative experiences.

What is the meaning of life? Why do bad things happen to good people? What happens when we die? You’ve got questions! Crash Course has answers. OK, maybe we don’t have those answers, but in Crash Course Religions (hosted by John), we’ll explore how a variety of religions respond to many of life’s greatest mysteries. We’ll observe similarities across different religions as well as diversity within them. We’ll also consider how religion bumps up against other areas of life, from social identity to political systems to popular culture.

Some Games to Play!

What Came First? (by Google Arts & Culture)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

We’re Here Portrait Gallery

We asked for self-portraits and you delivered! Thanks to everyone who sent us one. We loved seeing you all!

You made it to the end!

Now call or text a friend whose name starts with the letter M! Send us an email and tell us how it went.

Email us at [email protected]

We're Here is the newsletter of Nerdfighteria; the community of people that sprung up around Hank and John Green's YouTube videos. That community has many focuses and has spawned many projects but the overarching theme is that hopelessness is the wrong response to imperfection. What makes the world better is groups of people trying to understand and solve problems, and people can only do that for an extended period if they're having at least a little bit of fun.