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...
Long before great city walls were raised, 10,000 years ago, early hunter-gather-fishers as well as emerging farmers, built the settlement of Jericho (West Bank, Palestine) using adobe mud bricks,...
As the United Kingdom recovers from the jubilee celebrations which took place from the 2nd to the 5th June 2022, commemorating seventy years since Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne, the queen has...
Two extremely rare early Iron Age Hallstatt swords dating to the eighth century BC have been unearthed in the Bavarian town of Andechs in Starnberg district. These 2800-year-old swords are among the...
The origins of a rare sword discovered in a Greek monastery has baffled Greek archaeologists. However, it’s thought that the weapon might have belonged to Mediaeval Turkish pirates raiding the Greek...
As a species, mankind has always been obsessed with things that go bump in the night. Whether it be around a campfire, written down in a book, or shown on the big screen, we’ve been telling each...
History is filled with bizarre stories about death, and the ancient Greeks are no exception. While the great intellectual Empedocles is said to have jumped into a volcano, in a misguided attempt to...
What comes to mind when you think of a witch? For most people, the first image that comes to mind is of a witch flying through the night sky on a broomstick. Ever wondered why witches have been...
When you think of Spain, you don’t normally think of ice skates. Yet, that’s exactly what the King of Spain wanted back in 1572. And it wasn’t just a single pair; the king specifically requested 7,...
The Gurung tribespeople of Nepal have been collecting honey from Himalayan cliffs for centuries, risking their lives in an ancient tradition that has been passed down over many generations. But now...
