Yesterday I did a post about the “boring billion”: a period of Earth’s history when very little changed. Today I offer the exact opposite, which is the most exciting two minutes in all of existence. And those in fact were the first two minutes of everything, at the start of the Big Bang. We […]
This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century. But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than
Many of us have had need to wrap presents in the last few weeks, but maybe only some of us waited until early this morning on December 25 to start wrapping their children’s gifts. (Yours truly, ahem). The discipline of intentionally folding paper into different shapes is known as origami because this practiced flourished
I love how scientific technologies are helping us understand the earliest millennia of human history ever better. This drawing, for instance, features an artistic re-creation of skull fragments dated in 2017 that have helped to overturn our understanding of human evolution. Basic questions, such as “how long have Homo Sapiens been around?” And “where
Appearances of Homo Sapiens Read More »
You are looking at an artist’s rendition of a device known as “the staff of al-Tusi” which sounds like a magical weapon straight out of Tolkien but in fact was a genius scientific tool made by one of the most important mathematicians in history. Sharaf al-Din al-Muzaffar al-Tusi (c. 1135-1213) lived in various cities
The Linear Astrolabe of al-Tusi Read More »
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 »
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 don’t play videogames like Assassin’s Creed, but I am extremely grateful to them for drumming up enthusiasm for history and even getting concepts about the Middle Ages into popular culture. So this post is not intended to diss Assassin’s Creed! (Which has a very engaging plot and awesome graphics IMHO). But, historians will be
Yesterday, Shippensburg’s special collections librarian James Sterner gave a presentation about the history of book printing in Early Modern Europe. The university recently recieved a collection of rare books, including a 1609 copy of an English translation of Josephus’s _History of the Wars_.James Sterner used this copy to discuss the process of printing at this
Early Modern Book Printing Presentation Read More »
If you look for more than a second at the squiggles on this image, you will soon make out patterns of squares as well as some long lines joining them. These images made huge headlines in the fields of archaeology and history this month because of what they have revealed about an ancient civilization in
Ancient Civilization Discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon Read More »
This humble assemblage of metal has been the subject of fierce debate among historians — it is a 10th-century viking-age stirrup found in England. Horseback riding today would be unthinkable without this contraption, but it was not always that way. When the stirrup was introduced to Western Europe on a broad scale and what difference
The Introduction of the Stirrup to Western Europe Read More »
This is maybe the first computer bug, and relates to one of the more famous anecdotes adorning the legendary reputation of Grace Hopper, one of the most important developers of the computer in the 20th century. Hopper (d. 1992 age 85) earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale and was working as a professor until
First Computer Bug Anecdote to Grace Hopper Read More »
Behold the Lycurgus cup, from the 4th c. Late Roman Empire. It is the most exquisite example of a glass-making technique used the the Romans to produce a color-changing effect. Viewed straight-on, the cup is green, but viewed with backlighting it appears red – the technique involved blending the glass with extremely fine-ground particles of
The origins of human history keeps getting pushed further back in time, as a recent analysis of a wooden structure in Africa dating back almost a half a million years demonstrates. For reference, anthropologists now date the emergence of homo sapiens to about 200,000 years ago (although some argue for 300,000). The wooden structure discovered
Zambia Archaeological Site Has Earliest Known Wooden Structure Read More »
The Antikythera Mechanism from Ancient Greece had over 30 gears, and could predict when eclipses would happen, track the irregular orbit of the stars, and figure out when the Olympic games would happen!
The Antikythera Mechanism Read More »
The stately Classical background of Paris’ Panthéon has been the perfect location to house the invention of 19th-century physicist Léon Foucault: a massive pendulum made of a 62-lb brass-coated led bob, suspended from the Panthéon’s central dome by a 220-foot wire. Foucault debuted his pendulum in 1851, and although the original was damaged in 1995,
Foucault’s Pendulum Read More »
Looking at the ridges and furrows of fields such as this, one can get a rare glimpse of what Medieval agricultural topography was like. The undulating patterns you see here were made hundreds of years ago above the settlement of Wood Stanway in Medieval England. There are two big reasons why the landscape still looks
Wood Stanway and How the Black Death Changed England’s Landscape Read More »
It was ’round about this time of the year — near the Fourth of July — nearly eight decades ago that a rancher from New Mexico called W.W. Brazel brought a bunch of mysterious-looking debris he had found on his property to the local sheriff, who was situated about 80 miles southeast in the small
The Roswell Incident Read More »
One of the coolest Indigenous American weapons was the blowgun, which was developed well before the Columbian exchange. You can see painted on this ceramic from the modern Guatemalan Highlands from the Late Classic Maya period (CE 600-900) a row of hunters holding their blowguns as they return from a hunt (this image is a
The Invention of the (Poisoned) Blowgun by South American Peoples Read More »
These projectile points were discovered in a 9,000 year-old grave at Wilamaya Patjxa in southern Peru. Archaeologists immediately diagnosed the burial items as part of a hunter’s toolkit and assumed that the person they were buried with was a high-status male from an ancient hunter-gatherer community. However, DNA analysis revealed that the hunter was actually
Ancient Peruvian Weapons and Evidence for Early Women Hunters Read More »
