Enlarge (credit: NBCUniversal)

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot (S2E7)

If it wasn’t already obvious, the people behind Mr. Robot keep tabs on the news. But unlike some of the ripped-from-the-headlines shows syndicated elsewhere on USA, reality serves as background tapestry—and not necessarily direct plot inspiration—for the series. As NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told us ahead of this season, such a strategy “gives viewers the feeling everything is grounded in reality… Because they get the details right, the average viewer—and 80 percent of the viewers may not know the computer stuff—can watch it and it feels right. And when the show has to do something that’s unrealistic, this makes it that much easier to buy it.”

Last week, Mr. Robot put this idea to the ultimate test. S2’s big reveal has viewers confused about what reality means within the show’s universe, but that question largely applies to main character Elliot Alderson’s perception and not the show at large. Within the same hour, for instance, Elliot takes a very real-world approach to torpedoing the series’ stand-in for the Silk Road, Midland City. When invited to handle some sysadmin duties by the site’s operator, he subtly opens Midland City up to non-Tor traffic, indexes it on some top search engines, purchases a few banner ads elsewhere, and then tips the FBI about the whole thing. Simple and truthful.

Enlarge / This small sculpture of a rabbit was found in the early 1990s at the bunny apartment complex in the Oztoyahualco neighborhood of Teotihuacan. It is likely over 1,500 years old.

A group of anthropologists describe their discovery in PLoS One, filling in details of what appears to be a rabbit farm and butcher shop in a Teotihuacan neighborhood called Oztoyahualco. From roughly the 4th through 6th centuries, this neighborhood was home to an apartment compound that immediately stood out for a few reasons. Several rooms contained an enormous number of cottontail and jackrabbit remains, as well as soil with high phosphate levels that would indicate a lot of blood or fecal matter on the ground. One room had low stone walls “suggestive of a pen for domestic animal management,” the researchers write. Other rooms were full of obsidian blades and rabbit limbs, as if they were part of a butcher shop.

Add all those findings together and you’ve got what appears to be an apartment complex devoted to raising and slaughtering rabbits. One more piece of evidence strengthened the hypothesis: a previous excavation had uncovered an unusual rabbit sculpture (pictured above) on the site. Bunnies were obviously important to the people in this place.