Evidently

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear!
(Burns, of course) 

I love astronomy stories. The way that rock-hard science starts to sound like mythology when experts try to express it in language the rest of us might understand. They could as well be talking about the before-times, the age of saints, battles between Titans and Olympians, middle-earth and the coming of a star in the east

Some very happy astronomers have created a press release saying they have nearly-but-not-quite solved a problem that only they knew we had. Out there in the mythical distance and the impossible past are some galaxies, the size and shape of which previously puzzled them. Now their mathematical spells have conjured a great spirit that inhabits the soul of those galaxies, so they know that they have increased the store of human truth and light

I'm not mocking the science or the scientists. I'm not really even mocking the poor journalist who clearly didn't understand it either, but had to produce a story. A lot of the journos at the paper are on strike today, so whoever produced this may be very junior, and probably didn't get a lot of help. But, bless them, it's a classic aggregation of facts that do not coalesce into any coherent narrative

One detail did leap out at me, though. The strange, previously-inexplicable structure of these anachronistic galaxies, they say, is a consequence - a sign - of events that took place between eight and twelve billion years ago. That's 60-90% of all the time there has ever been. Things happened then that have left a definitive echo now. And somehow, trivial, insignificant, ephemeral little things that we are, we can hear it. Blow me down

The last log in (this section of) the log store came with a sign. Who knows how far in the past these seed-heads have been brought in to the space between the logs, the seeds removed from them, opened by small, precise teeth and emptied of the speck of nutritious seed-kernel. At least, I'm guessing that is the story - let's call it a hypothesis