When you were a kid, did you learn that the first humans in the Americas crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago? Scholars have overturned this chronology completely, but it held away for many years in part because of this type of spear- or knife- head technology featured here, which is the […]
Clovis Culture and Migration Read More »
I adore Medieval flora and fauna mistakes! When they got things wrong, they were so extra about it. So here’s an example of a made-up species that Medieval people thought existed, called the “Barnacle Goose,” or “Branta leucopsis”. Much like the “Lamb of Tartary,” which I did a different post about, the Barnacle Geese
M.C. Escher was an amazing surrealist artist whose works were frequently inspired by mathematics. Here is his 1963 work, “Moebius Strip II,” which shows ants crawling along the single-surface loop. First discovered by astronomer and mathematician August Möbius in 1858 (although it had been described in unpublished literature a few years prior by a
M.C. Escher and the Möbius Strip Read More »
This is a drawing of the prehistoric species Plesiosaurus, discovered by the paleontologist Mary Anning in 1823. Anning was a working-class, uneducated person who became one of England’s premier fossil scholars, but struggled her whole life — financially and professionally — because of her gender and class. Anning grew up on the southern coast
Mary Anning’s Plesiosaurus Read More »
This lovely creature was a Dinogorgon, one of many types of animals known as “Gorgonopsia,” the apex predators in the Permian Period. When I learned about how boss these creatures were, the nine-year-old paleontologist in me felt cheated because of all the front stage play that dinosaurs get. But these animals were amazing and thrived
This is a picture of Hvalsey Church, a Norse ruin from a settlement in Greenland that was abandoned in the 1400s. Scientists and historians have recently amended their ideas about what caused the collapse of this culture. In the late 900s, some Vikings from Iceland migrated to Greenland, setting up small communities that lasted
Everyone knows that the Medieval aristocracy was famed for the way they promoted the military prowess of knights on horseback. Gargantuan sums of money were spent selecting, breeding, and caring for war horses that could show off the status of their aristocratic riders. There is, therefore, a certain amount of glee to be taken by
The Horses of the Middle Ages Read More »
Yesterday’s post was about a legend of green people who lived in Medieval England. Today I bring to you the true story of blue people who lived in the United States in the 19th-21st centuries. The first group come from a family of Kentucky folks who stemmed from a common ancestor named Martin Fugate. He
The Blue Fugate Family Read More »
The Ancient Greeks were right to have the story of how Prometheus brought fire to the human race front-and-center in their mythology. Fire is an amazing thing — most vertebrates flee from it when it happens in the natural world. But we humans learned to control it, and that revolutionized our existence. The control of
Fire and Evolution Read More »
I’ve done loads of posts on human cannibalism, which might bring about some self-disgust for our species. Would it cheer you up to know, then, that it’s not just us moderns who’ve a legacy of eating each other?. Turns out, humans have a very long history of self-consumption, stemming back a million years to the
Ancestral Cannibals Read More »
See the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign on this tombstone from 1819? It really is, and this isn’t like the History Channel’s claims that aliens built the pyramids. But Spock, rather, borrowed from an actual human custom originating in Jewish tradition. Leonard Nimoy’s hand signal is half of a sacred gesture made by the
The Jewish Origins of the Vulcan Greeting Read More »
Ah, the poor doomed philosopher Giordano Bruno. Whereas Galileo had been allowed to live after recanting his astronomical views that ran counter to Roman Catholic teachings, Bruno — himself a Dominican friar — was executed by the Church in 1600. His death and his willingness to buck the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on acceptable views about
Giodano Bruno, the Doomed Philosopher Read More »
Wanna be a smidge happier? Learn about an extremely rare illness discovered in 1882 by the French neurologist Dr. Jules Cotard — if you can read this post, you almost certainly don’t have it. And for that, you will be gladdened. At his hospital at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, the doctor saw a patient
Cortard’s Syndrome Read More »
Take a guess as to what this Medieval illustration is a drawing of: upside-down fallopian tubes? Sea-creatures? Mirror-image diagrams of some planetary motion? The answer is below, but before you look — ask yourself how you are arriving at your guesses. The process of investigative inquiry to figure out the nature of reality is something
Hasan Ibn al-Haytham and the Scientific Method Read More »
So, I was looking up some information about the 13th-century thinker Roger Bacon the other day (as one does), and I came across a popular legend associated with the scholar in the Early Modern Period. It was a story about a magical automaton made of brass in the shape of a man’s head that could
Brazen Heads and Fortune Telling Read More »
I know a joke isn’t funny after you explain it, but at least after reading this you might find phlogiston humorous (and also, I just made a pun). Phlogiston isn’t real, but Early Modern scientists thought it was. They used it as a way to explain the ash or calx (for metals) residue after something
This is a mouflon, a type of mostly wild sheep that is a likely ancestor of all the domesticated sheep on earth today. Even if most of our clothing isn’t made of wool and most of our food isn’t lamb, human life wouldn’t be the same without this animal. Sheep and goats were the first
The Domestication of Sheep Read More »
Paleo-anthropologists have recently analyzed the skeletons of two humans dating over 2,300 years ago from Ancient China which suggest that deliberate amputation of the limbs of one leg might have been done as a type of legal punishment. The skeletons came from the former Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771-256 BCE) near the modern city of Sanmenxia.
Amputations in the Eastern Zhao Dynasty Read More »
Today I got a chance to hike Old Rag Mountain in the Shenandoah National Park, and everything about it was phenomenal: yellow butterflies so heavy they wobbled in their paths, mountain laurel and tulip poplar in bloom, full streams feeding the spring life. The Old Rag Trail is most famous for the rock scrambles up
This painting by the Early Modern European artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger shows a line of dancers, but they don’t look like they are having that much fun — for instance, the two women in the center are staring off into space, not paying attention to the musicians in their path. And that’s because they
The Dancing Disease Read More »
