A world of knowledge
| Published date | 14 February 2021 |
| Publication title | People, The |
Much simpler is an old Scottish rule that "if a piece of land will support a sheep, it's an island. If not, it's a rock".
The UN takes that a step further: in 2016, its Permanent Court of Arbitration said that the difference between a rock and an island is that the latter can support human life.
The world's smallest island by those rules is in the St Lawrence River, between New York and Ontario, and is called Just Room Enough. It's the size of a tennis court and contains just one house, one tree and a small patch of beach. The owners built the house to find peace and quiet, but because it is so unusual, it has become a tourist attraction, with boats full of sightseers going past.
Why on earth is that?
Why is there an Essex, a Wessex and a Sussex, but no Nossex? When the Romans left Britain in around 400 AD, the islands were extremely susceptible to invasion. Numerous groups arrived from Europe, settled in different regions and started naming these areas after themselves.
The biggest of these was the Saxons, a group who came from modern-day Germany and the Netherlands. They're responsible for the "sex" in Essex, which was where the East Saxons settled, Sussex, where the South Saxons lived, and Wessex (which covered much of the south coast from Hampshire to Devon), where you could find the West Saxons.
There was no Nossex because the Saxons didn't get particularly far north.
The Angles had come over from Denmark and made their home up there. Then there were the Jutes, who came from another part of Denmark and settled in Kent, Northumbria (the lands "North of the Humber") and Mercia, which got its name from a word meaning "boundary lands". Who is the most isolated person in the world?
The Amazon rainforest is home to more than two million species of animal and almost 400 billion trees, but you could walk for a long time before coming across evidence of another human.
One area, the Vale do Javari, is so unexplored that Brazil's highest mountain remained undiscovered there until 1962. There are tribes who live in Brazil's wilderness, out of contact with the modern world, and one of them is down to a single member.
WHY OH Codes signify weather stations
Brazilian officials first became aware of the man's existence around 25 years ago and gave him the nickname "Man of the Hole", due to the fact that he builds temporary homes which all have a large hole dug alongside them.
Nobody is quite sure what the holes are for: they might be to...
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