Highlighting Slaves' Poor Living Conditions, One 'Sleepover' at a Time

Give Joseph McGill some credit for keeping the faith.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation employee will be doing some hard yards this year to call attention to the plight of enslaved African-Americans during this, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. McGill is continuing a program he began last year, when he slept in former slave cabins in order to highlight the terrible conditions endured by many slaves. His unique project had him endure nights in 2010 on the ground in Alabama and South Carolina. This year, the "sleepovers" will take place in Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas.

It's all part of a plan to help people remember just how horribly some people suffered at the hands of others. History, it is often said, is repeated if people don't remember the mistakes of the past. Many slave buildings have gone — the result of neglect, deterioration, or active demolition. Plantation houses remain, of course, some of them historically so; but that is a different matter.

McGill, who got the idea after sleeping in a slave cabin near Charleston, S.C., in 2010 as a Civil War re-enactor for the 54 Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (the famed group that futilely stormed a heavily defended Fort Wagner). He is careful to take notes of his surroundings, including doing a little digging. Previous "sleepovers" have resulted in the discovery of bits of glass, bones, and other reminders of such buildings' slave past.

What, behind the rabbit? It IS the rabbit!

This was not the inspiration for Sir Bedivere's Large Wooden Rabbit.

Scientists have discovered that the world really did have a giant rabbit, though — or at least a one that was much bigger than today's furry-eared friends. This big Bugs Bunny ancestor was Nuralagus rex, or "the Minorcan king of the rabbits." The large rabbit was named that because of its size and also because of where the fossils were found — on the island of Minorca, off the coast of Spain. "Look at the bones, man [or woman]!"

That island connection is a huge one because it meant that the number of predators that Nuralagus rex would face was limited nearly entirely to what was already on the island (or introduced there by the occasional marauding ship full of conquistadors — those were usually rats, though, and so the rabbits would just kill the rats before they could transmit any dread diseases they happened to be carrying on their furry backs or feet). So, in the relative isolation, the "king of the rabbits" got to be six times of rabbits today and weigh in at 26 pounds. Check out the photo illustration: Those rabbits were huge! Lock up the carrot patch!

Notice, though, that you don't see a whole lot of big ears on those ancient rascals. See, the same evolution that dealt them a stacked deck in terms of predator paucity that enabled them to get that big also made sure that that lack of predators had some negative effects as well — namely, no big ears. If you don't need to hear that some bigger sharp-clawed, saber-toothed animal is barging toward you fangs bared, then you don't really need ears that are larger than normal, now do you?

In the same vein, these big bunnies didn't really have the ability to hop, like their modern counterparts do. (Not all that much like today's rabbits at all, are they?) Nuralagus rex had big long legs but didn't have the spine necessary to enable proper hopping, so they probably waddled around like ducks.

Other inhabitants of this island were bats and dormice. (Did Lewis Carroll pass through at any point?)

One more thing these ancient rabbits had a lack of: vision. Not too many carrots on Minorca, combined with that same lack of need to see the prey coming at you out of the corner of your very small eye, and you have something evolution just didn't provide. Good thing the biggest other animal on the island was a tortoise. Even a waddling rabbit could outrun that.

New site for Atlantis: Spanish swampland?

Atlantis, the famed kingdom of yore that was wiped out by massive waves, is 60 miles inland? Well, yes, if you believe a team of researchers who have been scouring the mud flats of southern Spain for the past few years.

The theory is that a tsunami powered up and over the "Pillars of Hercules," just as Plato said, and sent the Atlanteans to their doom. The site, according to this team of researchers, is not in the middle of the Atlantic or in the middle of the Mediterranean or off the coast of Florida (as Edgar Cayce thought) but right there on the European continent, just north of Cadiz, in modern-day Spain.

The proof is in so-called "memorial cities," which were built in the image of Atlantis — matching certain details set down by Plato in a dialogue so long ago — that show up on images taken by satellite cameras. It just so happens that the researchers have identified a site in the middle of the Dona Ana Park, one of the largest swamps in Europe, as the one being Atlantis.

The team also used ground-penetrating radar and underwater technology to piece together what they hope is a most monumental find indeed.

More details are to be revealed to the world via a National Geographic special. Stay tuned.