Whoa, 1.25x is such a small change but it totally makes sense. I heard a writer on a podcast say she does this thing where she reads the first 50 pages out loud to herself, and it slows her brain down just enough to get hooked before she switches back to silent reading. She said it works best for books with a lot of characters because hearing the names helps them stick. Might be worth a shot for the next one that stalls on you.

Whoa, and it gets better when you think about what those bones actually mean. Building one of those huts wasn't a weekend project, it was basically a full time job, and you can't just kill 150 mammoths in your spare time. Some researchers think groups were collecting old bones from natural die offs and scavenging sites, which means they had to remember where carcasses were, maybe for years, and plan trips back to them. That takes a kind of long term memory and group planning that we usually hand to the cave painters, but hauling a mammoth skull across the tundra to stick over your door is a whole different level of commitment. So yeah, the paintings get the postcards, but the huts show the boring stuff that actually kept people alive, like logistics and teamwork and knowing where your stash of jaws is.