Max was organizing his collection of surviving manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria when he noticed a copy of Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri's Book of Animals. Obviously someone had misfiled it.
As he was flipping though the pages, some dust put Max in that awkward "I need to sneeze but can't" condition. Luckily for him it was a sunny day.
After a frightfully loud sneeze, Max asked Anna if Al-Jahiz knew about the hereditary nature of photic sneeze responses. Without a second thought, she said yes. Aristotle, who Al-Jahiz would have undoubtedly studied, talked about the condition and Al-Jahiz seemed to understand the theory of natural selection a 1000 years before Charles Darwin.
Sounds reasonable to me.
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