Not surprisingly, few museum curators jumped at the chance to give Neanderthal bones from their collections to a bunch of stripling geneticists who wanted to saw lumps off them.
Karpov is 57, a mere stripling beside his rival, and little more than a decade ago he was close to his peak.
When, as a young minister in East Belfast, he was challenged by a group of disaffected members, he won over the elders by asserting, "Gentlemen, I am just a boy, a stripling, but I believe the Book, and…I'm going to preach this Book".
To date, however, few of them had been elevated to positions of real power.The promotion of Prince Muhammad, a mere stripling at 53, has understandably sparked much speculation.
On June 1st he hopes to win another four-year term, which he promises will be his last.Unusually, someone stands in his path to goal: Mohamed Bin Hammam, the Qatari head of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and something of a stripling at 61.
They are, to start with, extraordinarily durable institutions: Mr Summers's own Harvard, founded in 1636, is a mere stripling compared with the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, or Paris and Oxford, born less than a century later.
His finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee (a stripling at 76), spends more time tackling political crises than keeping promises of a new goods-and-services tax, lifting caps on foreign investment in insurance and retail, or getting money spent on infrastructure.Something has been achieved: a big rise in welfare spending, especially in rural areas, that has helped to boost incomes of villagers.
In private, however, Lebanese politicians are prone to dismiss the new Mr Assad as a young stripling.
Its leaders have not forgotten the father, and the stripling 71-year-old son will get a warm welcome on a first official trip to Beijing in late December or early January.
Though no stripling, he would hunger to get to Siam, Sinkiang or Tartary.
A callow stripling of 60 or so may then conceivably be allowed to steer the kingdom faster towards modernity and perhaps even greater justice, equality and choice; forget the infamy of full democracy for now.The pity is that the reforms have come so late and have previously been so tentative.
