You never know what you will find.

Lately, I have been stuck in the bowels of the Iziko Museum (previously the South African Museum) looking for ancient teeth. I have to find and analyse these teeth as part of my research. My experience is just like you see in the movies. A dark, musty warehouse dotted with artificial light and filled with hundreds of boxes, each covered in a layer of dust on shelves that reach the ceiling. It is cold, very quiet and fairly creepy. Being surrounded by skeletons doesn't help. All these boxes are filled with archaeological material found over the last century or more. The boxes I am interested in are the one's marked 'Human Skeletal Remains' (Twanji, just breathe). These hunter-gatherer remains are from archaeological sites around South Africa and date from approximately 500 years ago to about 9000 years ago. They were catalogued, boxed and stored in the museum since the 1920's. But this is not what I want to tell you. While going through these boxes I have found some interesting things - besides the bones.

Strange and very old containers have been used to store loose teeth and fragile small bones. Old containers like little decorated pill boxes and ancient cigarette cases of brands I have never heard of. The most interesting find was a newspaper that was protecting some skull fragments. It was the 'La Tribune de Geneve' dated November 16, 1939. It was amazing to see faces from that time staring back at me. There were articles on the war, on the postal service and something to do with government. If I could read French, I would have been able to understand more. You could buy a teddy bear for 1.35 - Franks, I assume and cheese for even less. There was also a cartoon about Hitler and some crosswords and games for the kids. It was great reading! The world was very different then.

What else happened in November 1939?

World War II news

• Japanese forces advanced into southern China.
• The British government declared a blockade on German imports.
• The Red Army invaded Finland.
• Germany formally annexed western Poland into the German Reich.
• Joseph Stalin formally annexed eastern Poland into the Soviet Union. (Shame, poor Poland!)

Other news

• Baseball: The youngest of the three DiMaggio brothers, Dom DiMaggio, was bought for $40,000 by the Boston Red Sox from San Francisco.
• Apparently, its the release of Volume 1, issue #3 of the Superman comics and the creation of Batman.
• Blogger won't let me upload the cover of Vogue magazine. Its a pic of a woman in a red suit with a chicken. "FASHION MEETS THE CHALLENGE OF WAR"
• George S. Kaufman, playwright and humourist was on the cover of Time Magazine for this week.
• Ernest Orlando Lawrence gets the Nobel Prize for Physics (uranium-isotope separation in the Manhattan Project).
• Top grosing films are Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz.
• Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet, is born.
• Interesting reads: Coming up for Air by George Orwell, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Elliot.
• Cole Porter was the music favourite.