In her experiment she discovered that shorter profiles are also better. "Women that you would want to be friends with had profiles of like 3,000 words, but to be good at online dating you should create a curiosity gap."

There is an amygdala-tickling genius here, but also a kind of movie-trailer mawkishness. What’s the "secret"? An entertaining slideshow of Upworthy’s headline-writing strategies last year repeatedly references the "curiosity gap." The idea is both to share just enough that readers know what they’re clicking and to withhold just enough to compel the click.

This piece won’t answer all your questions (like the residual effect on flora and fauna, which isn’t an archeological issue), but it manages to fill a bit of the curiosity gap that still exists in one corner of that intensely strange time.