My science feeds are abuzz with the story behind an article published this month of November 2022 in _Nature Ecology & Evolution_ that redates a human invention — deliberate cooking of food — to 780,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens evolved. The species Homo erectus (see first image) is the likeliest human ancestor that […]
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Poor little toads of the Medieval period, getting stuck with horrid associations of despicable things — putrefaction, death, and lust. And did you notice how all three of those adjectives were lumped together? That’s because the Christian Church at the time intentionally set about trying to make carnality associated with disgusting things, because church doctrine
The Chateau of Montségur might look Medieval, but it was actually built up on the destroyed ruins of the Medieval fortress where about 210 people belonging to the Christian Albigensian sect were burned as heretics in 1244. In the early 1200s, Pope Innocent III enacted an Inquisition — a legal investigation — to determine who
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The story of the Harlem Hellfighters (aka 369th Infantry Regiment) is one of the most epic accounts of heroism in wartime that doesn’t get talked about in U.S. history books. In the spring of 1918, two U.S. soldiers fighting on the Western Front successfully took on about 24 German forces in an early morning raid.
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Japanese history has a remarkable record of women who excelled in the martial arts, despite the overall legacy of Medieval patriarchy that co-existed for so long. Many stories of female generals and warriors only appear briefly in the historical sources, and cloud the details of such women’s lives. And this is one of the reasons
In his tragic and comedic novel _The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao,” author Junot Díaz has his narrator say the following about the dictator featured here, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina:. “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the
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The way cutting-edge technology lets us see into the distant past is so cool. Recently, a technique called “photometric stereo workflow” enabled Medieval historian Jessica Hodgkinson take a fresh appraisal of the pages of a manuscript written in south-east England in the first half of the 700s. The historian discovered that the name of a
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Just last month, this stone slab from an Ancient Roman military camp in Britain was discovered. Historians have identified it as a board for the game called “Ludus Latrunculorum” or “the mercenary game” which we know about from other sources. The speculation is that it ran along the lines of “checkers.” It offers a glimpse
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“Christ with the Adulteress” is one of the most famous forgeries in history. Painted by the 20th-century Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, it was sold to the infamous Nazi Hermann Goring who considered it among his most prized collections. After the Second World War ended, Goring faced both the war trials (which resulted in his
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Scene: a British coffeehouse from the late seventeenth century. Fact: to us, this cafe likely would have smelled far better than London’s streets, with their crowds and lack of sewage treatment. However – what we consider a pleasant aroma has changed over time. As historian of smell Mark S. R. Jenner writes, “in 1657 a
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Between 1582 to 1589, the British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelly claimed to have received multiple messages from angels. Writing these transmissions up, they formed the basis of the Enochian magical system, which was re-discovered and popularized over 300 years later by Alistair Crowley, a controversial (and free-love promoting) spiritualist. Pictured here is a
Look carefully and you might find that one of these Commandments gives very different directions than the usual . . . . This is a photograph from the so-called “Wicked Bible” – published in 1631 in London – which exhorted readers to commit adultery in one of the most notorious typos in history. When King
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This is a sword by Goro Nyudo Masamune (c. 1264-1343), considered to be the greatest swordsmith in Japanese history. His swords have a recognizable set of characteristics, one of the most famous being his skill in producing a quality called “nie” an appearance in the blade of Martensite (hard steel in crystal formation) embedded in
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The Heraea was an Ancient Greek holiday featuring sporting events with women participants. Done in honor of Hera, the goddess of fertility, the competitors raced each other for prizes. The runner featured here is a Spartan, and she wears the short tunic and one-shoulder garment typical for that city-state.
Scholars think that the diameters of these various circles on the wall of this church of San Nicola, in Pisa, Italy, were an intentional representation of the famed Fibonacci sequence made in the 13th century. (They represent the first nine numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and 55.) Leonardo Fibonacci was from
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The women in these murals from the New Kingdom Era of Ancient Egypt 16th-11th centuries BCE are wearing perfume cones on their heads. Flowers and aromatic spices such as Jasmine and frankincense were cold-pressed into lard or beeswax. The cones would have been worn for special occasions, and would have slowly melted, making the cone-wearer’s
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If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was
The Vietnamese Trung sisters rose up against invading Chinese armies in 40 CE, and successfully rebelled for three years before their deaths. Often depicted as sword-bearing women riding on elephants, they have become a nationalist symbol for Vietnam. The Trung sisters have temples dedicated to them, statues of them adorn many city quarters, and holidays
Syphilis caused widespread suffering in Early Modern Europe – this portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn of a sufferer from about 1665 illustrates the facial deformities that occurred as the disease progressed. Scientists still debate where the disease originated, but one idea is that strains of the bacteria causing syphilis had developed independently Europe and in
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An ancient bristlecone pine over 5,000 years old is the oldest living thing on earth (at least, as far as scientists could document in 2016). That means it was contemporary with the first urban civilization in Sumer! The tree grows in the White Mountains in California in the Inyo National Forest. The location of the
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