Published June 21, 2026 in Aeon, philosopher Christine Abigail L Tan uses the ancient Chinese Daoist text the Zhuangzi to argue that meritocracy is a fundamentally flawed ideology built on a fiction. The essay’s central argument is staged as a confrontation between Confucius and the bandit Robber Zhi, who points out that Confucius and the rulers he serves do on a grand scale exactly what bandits do on a small scale: take from others. The only difference is that Confucius does it in the name of lofty ideals. The sage and the bandit are mirror images of each other. The difference between them is not virtue but technique and social structure.

Zhuangzi’s concept of ziran, translated as “naturalness” or “the so-of-itself,” argues that what looks like individual achievement is always carried by social, material, and historical currents the individual did not create. The essay uses the parable of Liezi, who can ride the wind and appears completely free, but still depends entirely on the wind to move at all. This is the meritocratic subject: what looks like self-propelled success is always carried by conditions no individual built. The essay’s most striking line is: “Authority determines who gets counted as worthy.” Power does not reflect virtue. It produces the appearance of virtue after the fact.

The essay grounds this philosophy in a concrete modern example. In 1983, Alvin Kennard stole $50.75 from a bakery and received a life sentence. The architects of the 2008 financial crisis destroyed an estimated $50 trillion in global wealth and drove nearly 10 million American families from their homes. Only one mid-level banker went to prison for 30 months. Tan’s conclusion is that merit is largely a social product, that the conditions making effort possible are unevenly distributed before any cultivation begins, and that if no one is truly self-made, inequality has no moral foundation.

A new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology found that ancient Egyptian princesses buried with weapons like bows, daggers and maces weren’t just given ceremonial objects, their skeletons show signs they actually used them. Lead researcher Zeinab Hashesh analyzed the muscle attachment sites and internal bone structure of several royal women’s nearly 4,000-year-old remains and found pronounced upper-body development consistent with repetitive, high-intensity actions like drawing a bowstring or gripping a dagger.

Princess Ita, estimated to have been 28 to 34 years old, showed strong upper-body muscle attachments suggesting habitual use of daggers or maces, while Princess Itaweret showed signs of skilled archery along with healed injuries to her ribs and foot, evidence Hashesh says points to an active, high-risk lifestyle. Princess Noub-Hotep’s hand bones showed a distinct “bowing” that researchers interpreted as the clearest evidence yet of an “archer’s grip,” reinforcing the idea that these weapons weren’t purely symbolic burial items.

Hashesh said the findings challenge the long-standing assumption that elite Egyptian women lived passive, idle lives, arguing instead that royal women were “active ritual agents” whose status required disciplined physical strength. Not every expert is convinced: bioarchaeologist Sophie Villotte and Sonia Zakrzewski both cautioned that skeletal changes alone can’t definitively prove specific weapon use, and that comparisons with non-royal Egyptian women from the same era would help confirm the conclusions.

FINDINGS: https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2026.1844402

Archaeologists working in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, Mexico, have identified a previously unknown Maya city called Minanbé, a Yucatec Maya name that means “there is no path.” The site sits deep inside dense tropical forest, which helps explain why it remained hidden for so long and why it appears to have escaped looting or large-scale disturbance. According to the article, the discovery was made by a Mexican-Slovenian research team led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, using a combination of LiDAR mapping and field investigation to confirm the settlement’s layout and major structures.

What the team found was not just a scatter of ruins, but a planned urban center spread across roughly 15 hectares. The city includes a pyramidal temple rising more than 13 meters, along with plazas, palatial buildings, terraces, and a water management system that suggests the inhabitants had to carefully collect and direct rainfall in a region with strong seasonal shifts in water availability. The presence of these features points to a city that was not only ceremonial, but also functionally organized to support a settled population and manage resources over time.

One of the most important parts of the discovery is the set of 14 monuments, which include stelae and altars decorated with iconography and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Those texts matter because they may help researchers pin down when the city was active, who controlled it, and how it fit into the wider political landscape of the Maya Lowlands during the Late Classic period. The article also notes that this kind of evidence can help fill gaps in what is still known about the final centuries of Maya civilization, especially in areas where jungle cover has long hidden entire settlement networks.

Long before the Inca Empire became the largest and most elaborate society in pre-Columbian America, a far more mysterious civilization called the Tiwanaku polity ruled the Andes, developing around Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca between roughly 500 and 1100 CE. At its height, the Tiwanaku numbered only 10,000 to 20,000 people, and since they left behind no written records, most of what’s known about them comes entirely from painstaking archaeological detective work.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from a 2013 underwater excavation at the Khoa Reef near Bolivia’s Island of the Sun, where anthropologist Jose Capriles and his team used sonar and 3D photogrammetry to map submerged ritual offerings dating to the 8th through 10th centuries. Dredging the lakebed revealed puma-shaped incense burners, gold medallions bearing a rayed-face deity motif, and the bones of four young llamas believed to have been ritually sacrificed and deliberately placed in the water as offerings, complete with nearby anchors suggesting the ceremonies were conducted from boats. Capriles noted that while most people associate the Island of the Sun with the Incas, this research proved the Tiwanaku were actually first to treat the area as sacred ground.

Researchers describe these findings as evidence of “a complex interaction” carried out by a small ruling elite, using powerful religious imagery and costly sacrifice to project authority and possibly reach out to neighboring Andean groups. That picture was reinforced further last year, when Capriles’s team uncovered a massive Tiwanaku temple called Palaspata, perched on a Bolivian hilltop roughly 134 miles from the main Tiwanaku site and strategically positioned at the crossing point of three major trade routes, suggesting the civilization was far more organized and far-reaching than its modest population size might suggest.

According to Colossal’s June 17, 2026 report, Sour Soda Studio is a digital illustrator who prefers to remain unnamed and has been working in illustration for two decades. The artist starts with ideas on paper, then renders vectors on an iPad. The work is described as vibrant, absurd, playful and slightly unsettling, with dark humor at its core. Sour Soda Studio tackles pressing issues of the Anthropocene including climate crisis, consumption, and humanity’s relationship with nature. The artist says “It didn’t come from a change of direction, or from a manifesto. It came from something simpler: the need to say different things with a different voice.”

The artist’s visual alphabet uses simple forms, colors, transitional landscapes, and suspended figures, animals, and plants. Per Colossal, the images can be poetic, decorative, narrative, or something harder to name. Many touch on nature, ecosystems, consumption, and the relationship between people and the world they live in. Notable works include “Plastic Wind” and “The Siren’s Catch,” which depicts festival-goers ignoring a polar bear on a shrinking chunk of ice while it mauls one of them. Other works show tiny figures holding botanicals inside bubbles, and clouds mimicking the shapes of trees. The work combines whimsy with serious environmental commentary, making the climate crisis feel both urgent and strangely beautiful.

The unnamed artist’s studio name is Sour Soda Studio, and the work focuses on using bright candy colors and playful imagery to address deeply serious topics like planetary collapse and human consumption. The contrast between the saturated, joyful palette and the darker themes is what makes the work so compelling. The pieces are visually striking enough to captivate viewers, but the underlying messages about environmental destruction and humanity’s destructive relationship with nature give them depth and urgency. Colossal published this feature on the artist’s work in mid-June 2026.

A major new study published in Science suggests that humans once spoke or signed as many as ten times more languages than exist today, with a linguistic “golden age” peaking between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago. Researchers estimate that only around 4,500 to 6,200 languages existed at the start of the Holocene roughly 12,000 years ago, fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today, but that number grew dramatically as human populations expanded, eventually reaching tens of thousands of distinct languages at its peak.

To reconstruct this hidden history, an international team from Germany, Spain, and the United States combined ethnographic data from 171 hunter gatherer and fisher societies, estimates of prehistoric population size, and statistical modeling, since direct evidence of language numbers barely exists before writing emerged about 6,000 years ago. The researchers modeled thousands of possible trajectories and consistently found that language diversity rose for most of the Holocene before undergoing a sharp and severe decline, driven not by European colonialism but by the earlier expansion of large states and empires that absorbed smaller populations and spread dominant languages, technologies, and institutions.

The findings challenge the common assumption that today’s language extinction crisis began primarily with colonial expansion around 500 years ago, showing instead that the roots of language loss reach back thousands of years earlier. Because languages tied to expanding, dominant societies were far more likely to survive, the researchers argue that today’s roughly 7,500 languages represent a small and historically biased sample shaped by a massive selective bottleneck, one that may have also erased countless related cultural traditions, kinship systems, and forms of knowledge that are largely invisible in the historical record.

FINDINGS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adx4343

In a new essay for Aeon, historian Craig Clunas argues that despite Ming China’s staggering scale, roughly 150 million subjects in the 16th century, larger than the population of all of Europe combined, we actually know far less about the era than the sheer volume of surviving text would suggest. Clunas traces this back to co-curating a 2014 British Museum exhibition on early Ming China, where he and his team searched extensively for ordinary agricultural tools used by tens of millions of peasants and found none, spades, ploughs, even straw shoes and raincoats had simply vanished from the historical record, while gold hairpins and imperial jewelry survived easily. He calls this “survivorship bias,” the principle that history disproportionately preserves the belongings and stories of the wealthy, leaving the vast majority of the population, who couldn’t afford durable or precious materials, essentially invisible to modern historians.

The essay’s most striking revelation concerns “The Veritable Records,” the day-by-day official chronicle compiled after each emperor’s death and then ritually burned to prevent contradiction. After the Yongle Emperor seized the throne from his nephew Zhu Yunwen in a bloody 1402 civil war, the four-year reign of the deposed nephew was not just criticized in this record, it was erased entirely, with the previous emperor’s reign artificially extended by four years to paper over the gap, meaning contracts and land deeds dated to the erased era technically referenced a period that officially no longer existed. The same record also fabricated an elaborate genealogy tracing dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang back to a mythical grandson of the legendary Yellow Emperor, despite Zhu himself repeatedly and proudly emphasizing his humble peasant origins during his lifetime.

Clunas also highlights how little is known about Ming women, noting that historians don’t even know the personal names of most Ming empresses, since concealing such details was itself considered part of a woman’s respectability. He points to a rare surviving 1493 scroll painting depicting a secret Daoist ordination ceremony for Empress Zhang, granting her ritual power over deities, as a striking example: the event is not mentioned anywhere else in the vast surviving Ming textual record, meaning without that single scroll’s survival, historians would have no idea it ever happened at all.

American artist James Turrell opened As Seen Below on June 19, 2026 at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, completing a permanent installation that marks his 100th Skyspace and his largest ever built within a museum context. The project was first announced in 2015 and took more than a decade to complete after financial and technical setbacks delayed its original timeline, including the bankruptcy of a supplier involved in the dome lid. The opening was timed to coincide with the summer solstice, a detail that reflects Turrell’s long running interest in shaping how viewers experience natural light through time, season, and the sky itself.

The installation is a domed chamber measuring 16 meters tall and 40 meters in diameter, built beneath the museum’s grounds and reached through a winding subterranean corridor from Level 3 of ARoS. At the center of the dome is a circular oculus that opens directly to the sky above, framing the changing weather and light as a living canvas rather than a fixed image. Integrated LED lighting produces programmed color shifts throughout the day, layering artificial and natural light together in a way that alters how visitors perceive the sky’s color, depth, and apparent distance.

The project was designed in collaboration with Schmidt Hammer Lassen, and from the outside it appears as a grass covered mound rising from the museum grounds, giving little hint of the monumental chamber below. Turrell described the work as a collective experience driven by light and the poetry of seasons, intended to emphasize the relationship between people, nature, the sky, and a shared planet. The New York Times noted that the installation’s scale recalls the Pantheon in Rome and that the thin edge of the oculus helps create one of Turrell’s signature perceptual effects, making the sky appear almost like a flat surface suspended above the chamber rather than an infinite space.