You are looking at the footprint of a giant sloth – one of the megafauna mammals that died out by the end of the last ice age over 11,700 years ago. Nestled inside is a contemporary human footprint, one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that giant sloths interacted with people. At eight feet […]
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This photo of a Medieval staircase from Ballyhannon Castle in Ireland (c. 1490) shows a typical construction: the staircases were usually spiralled clockwise moving up, so that defenders could take the advantage using the center beam for protection, while attackers had a harder time using their sword-arms without exposing their bodies. An exception that proves
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When the artist Larry Harvey first set fire to a 9-foot wooden effigy of a man and began a ceremony now celebrated annually at Black Rock City, Nevada, he had never heard of the famous 1973 cult horror film, “The Wicker Man,” which took its cue from an alleged Celtic practice of human sacrifice. In
Human Sacrifice in Ancient Celtic British Life Read More »
This mother chimpanzee is using stones to crack open a nut, as a child watches and learns. The skill-level needed for this operation is difficult (finding the right anvil-shaped stone, using another proper-sized stone to bang, learning how to position the nut, etc), and it will be until the young chimp is about six before
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This late 15th-c illustration shows a man preparing a mixture called “Theriac,” which for over a millennia was perhaps the most valued curative substance (or so it was advertised) across Eurasia. You can see the snakes unfurling under the man’s feet: they’re there representing the serpentine venom the ancient recipe demanded. Another crucial ingredient was
Mithridates and His Antidote Testing Read More »
Across the millennia, one of our common traits is the desire to feel special: this has been played out in terms of aristocratic status, patriarchal markers, race, and middle-school politics. Finding a solid boundary between “human” and “non-human” is yet another instance of seeking specialness. However, both scientists and historians are making this boundary increasingly
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The use of magical amulets and charms was common in the Ancient Roman world, where most people didn’t think material causality determined their futures. Instead, more people considered the dangerous forces of fate, the daemonia who embodied those forces, or the Gods to be the primary agents in everyday existence. In order to gain some
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You are looking at one of over half a million pieces of ancient papyrus writing, found in perhaps the most famous trash-heap in history: Oxyrhynchus. Located in Egypt, Oxyrhynchus was a flourishing city between the 200s BCE to the 600s CE, with the sort of weather patterns that make archaeologists’ hearts flutter because they preserve
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These gold dentures from the Ancient Etruscan culture seemed to have been popular on the northern portion of the Italian Peninsula from the late eighth through the mid sixth centuries. Even though extant Etruscan writings are limited to inscriptions, archaeological evidence suggests that they were worn to show off the wearer’s elite status, and those
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Leaders in the European Middle Ages issued coins as a kind of aspirational statement of stable power. After all, currency is only as successful as a community’s faith in its worth. But what happens when a leader goes out of favor, or dies? This is a photo of coins issued by two English kings, one
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Religious traditions across history have commonly developed rituals around purity and how to properly bury the dead: quite often, these areas overlapped. In the ancient period of the Zoroastrian religion (developing in modern Iran), records of disposing human corpses in a non-polluting way were documented as early as the fifth century BCE. Zoroastrians thought that
After-Death Religious Traditions of the Zoroastrians Read More »
This terracotta statue from Ancient Rome of a breastfeeding mother with four swaddled infants gets at the challenges of raising babies when resources were scarce and infant mortality high. Scholars have been debating the extent to which ordinary people practiced infanticide, but it was undertaken without criminal prosecution in the Ancient Roman world. After all,
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This gladiator mural was unveiled just last week from the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The unusually graphic depiction of a bleeding fighter — holding his thumb up, a gesture to signal for mercy — was found by archaeologists in a building thought to have been a bar and brothel. Since we know that gladiators
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This skull from Ancient Rome has a tiny coin glinting out of its mouth: the money is an obal, one of the most notorious grave-goods of the Ancient Mediterranean. The literature of Greeks and Romans commonly asserts that the obal was meant to pay the price for the dead to be carried over the river
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In the far north-eastern part of China, the beautiful but deeply inhospitable Flaming Mountains lie. Travellers going across the Silk Road in ancient history avoided this area, skirting south to parts of the desert that contained waterholes and vegetation. The Turpan Oasis was one of these (see second photo), and it was in this region
First Historical Stash of Marijuana Read More »
In Early Medieval Europe, to have a book meant you were fantastically wealthy. But to commission a book such as the one featured here meant you were at the pinnacle of society. This manuscript is the _Codex Argenteus_, and it is among the most important human-made objects created in sixth-century Europe. Parchment was expensive and
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This bra broke history: excavated out of a rubble heap from a medieval castle in Austria in 2008, it was one of four bras discovered there, all dating to the 15th century. This find brought up to four our total examples of extant medieval bras — before these fragments from Lengberg Castle, we had zero.
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This is one of the most famous pharaohs from Ancient Egypt: Hatshepsut (d. 1458 BCE). She was highly effective in all arenas — economic, foreign policy, religious affairs — but although those who lived under her rule recognized her authority, having a female ruler (even a super talented one) jarred too much with expectations about
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This closeup of a female figurine now at the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology is an example of similar ones common to the Kingdom of Judah in the 8th through 6th centuries. (The second image shows more.) Historians debate their meaning — did they represent the Cannanite Goddess Asherat, who was sometimes associated as
Female Figurines in the Kingdom of Judah Read More »
The earliest date that humans first settled in the Americas is something anthropologists do not agree upon – yet. Although whole-genome DNA processing might someday shed more light on the subject, some scholars favor an idea that people first crossed the Bering Straights less than 20,000 years ago, while others argue for an earlier wave
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