Two small chunks of metal, buried separately but near each other, have turned out to be parts of the same ornate Viking sword. Separated 1,200 years ago, the first part of the sword ‘Queen of Gausel...
A power vacuum caused by an extreme drought 1,500 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula led to political unrest, war, and societal change. These were the preconditions that led to the development and...
Was there a Papal conspiracy around Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America? Is it possible that the history of the ‘discovery of America’ has been told omitting details that only now re-emerge...
One of the biggest feats of Roman ingenuity lies in Lebanon’s historic Bekaa Valley, home to the ancient city of Heliopolis, now Baalbek. Here, the 2,000-year-old Temple of Jupiter was built on top...
Used frequently as a warning, almost, to deter people from shifting towards cryptocurrencies, particularly the Bitcoin boom, “tulipmania” is often recognized as the first recorded speculative bubble...
Take a look around someone’s house and you can learn a great deal about their way of life and their culture. This is true for historic dwellings as well, and the Iraqi mudhif reed house is no...
A potentially corrupt priest, an ancestral link to Jesus Christ and hidden treasure, the story of Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château is like something one would expect to see in movie theaters,...
A scourge of early medieval Europe, the Vikings were a fearsome group. The very thought of a Viking sword slashing before you conjures images of fearless warriors raiding and pillaging villages,...
About 60,000 years ago, a human had a sexual encounter with a Neanderthal. Now, a genetic scientist has claimed that this single sexual act caused the deaths of up to a million people during the...
The Norse sagas are filled with astonishing death scenes. In his book Laughing Shall I Die, Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings , Tom Shippey explains that the defiant Viking attitude to death was...
Archaeologists who’ve launched exploratory digs along the path of the HS2 high-speed rail project in England have made some fascinating and amazing discoveries. The latest addition to the list of...
An archaeological investigation of maritime remains connected to the Viking Age town of Birka in Sweden carried out since August 2020 has revealed a “first of its kind” Viking shipyard. Birka, also...
Roughly six million years ago, paleo-earthquakes created a type of geological phenomenon called trovants. They are also known as the stones of Costesti, after their most famous location in Romania,...
Can you imagine waking up in a world with no toilet paper? What would you use? Can you imagine what people did before toilet paper became so ubiquitous? Toilet paper is among the most essential...
Artifacts belonging to the era of King Khufu (also known as Cheops), who ruled sometime in the 26th century BC or nearly 4,500 years ago, have been discovered in Cairo’s Ayn-Shams neighborhood by the...
The Black Death or Black Plague killed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people in just seven years, from 1346 to 1353. About 50 million died in Europe alone, which made it the epicenter of the...
Billions of dollars of gold, silver and emeralds encrust a tiny patch of the Caribbean Sea. In 1708, during the War of Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714), a British Navy warship sailing from Panama...
In 1392 France, Charles Poupart, a treasurer to king Charles VI (1368 – 1422), recorded a payment to a Parisian painter named Jacquemin Grigonneur for painting three illuminated packs of cards...
In 16th century Europe, anyone suffering from arthritis, bone pain, toothache or gout could trot down to their local pharmacy and pick themselves up a bottle of Axungia hominis ( human fat ). Known...
An advanced 3,000-year-old Chinese culture, whose existence was not known about until the 1980s, has been further revealed by recent excavations. Apparently, the existence of the highly developed...
Last week, French archaeologists found the long-lost remains of a 2,100-year-old Gallo-Roman worship complex in Rennes, Brittany (northwestern France) on a hilltop with sweeping views of the Flume...
Let’s begin this story with an exercise. If you are not driving, lie down on your back. Bend your knees and place your feet on the ground about your hips-width distance apart. Now, place your right...
When we hear the two words, “drugs” and “war,” used in the same sentence, we might think of the “War on Drugs” but what about drugs during war or drugs after war? Addictive drugs and armed warfare...
Robert the Bruce is one of the most, if not the most famous Scotsmen to have ever lived. Infamous for the 14th-century reign that saw him taking on England’s much bigger and better-equipped army and...
