Stand on the rocky shoreline near the foot of the Pointe Aux Barques lighthouse, at the tip of the thumb of Lower Michigan, and look north across the blue expanse of Lake Huron. You will not see any caribou. But they were there, as were the humans that scientists believe hunted them nearly 10,000 years ago.

Now, thanks to innovative technology, determination, and luck, archaeologists are bringing this lost human history to the surface, and piecing together the mystery of a hunter-gatherer society unlike any other in the region.

The North American Great Lakes, sometimes called inland seas, are the world’s largest freshwater system. They seem as immense and ancient as any ocean, but Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, as we know them today, are younger than Stonehenge. For generations, people watched them form and adapted as the landscape changed again and again.

Between the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago and about 3,000 years ago, the entire Great Lakes region experienced dramatic shifts in environment, climate, and elevation. Glaciers that covered it retreated in fits and starts, and paleolakes formed and disappeared again, leaving behind boggy tundra. The bedrock itself rose and fell like a very large trampoline. Through it all, humans moved across the landscape, hunting, foraging, and even trading along networks spanning thousands of miles.

A satellite view of the North American Great Lakes; a submerged feature called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge is just to the right of image center, off the thumb of Lower Michigan. (JEFF SCHMALTZ, NASA/PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Understanding these radically evolving landscapes and the people who lived on them has long been a challenge for archaeologists—especially if you’re looking on land. Large portions of the land around today’s Great Lakes have acidic soil, which quickly breaks down everything from bones to wooden structures. Centuries of farming and other intensive land use have also destroyed or damaged many possible archaeological sites.

Beneath the waves, however, it’s a different story. There, archaeologists have found hunting structures and hearths, weapons and tools, all swallowed by rising waters and untouched for millennia.

“The stuff in the Great Lakes is like Pompeii, where the water is like the ash, sealing these deposits completely intact,” says Ashley Lemke, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies hunter-gatherers of the Great Lakes and other regions.

Lemke is part of the team that has spent years exploring an underwater site more than 60 miles north of Pointe Aux Barques, and currently about 120 feet below Lake Huron’s surface. The site, known as Drop 45 Drive Lane, hints at the ingenuity of some of the earliest humans in the Great Lakes region—but also presents a mystery about who these people were.

The roughly 20-acre submerged site is named both for how it was found (during an acoustic survey) and for what the team believes it is: a human-built structure that drove animals into a narrow space, or lane, where hunters waited.

Since its discovery more than a decade ago, Drop 45 has yielded artifacts big and small, from stone hunting blinds to flakes of chert, a type of rock often used for making tools, including arrowheads and spear tips. Flakes of obsidian were also found at the site. The specific chemical signature of these pieces of volcanic glass indicates they came from formations in Oregon, more than 2,500 miles away, hinting at a cross-continental trade network nearly 10,000 years ago. But the story of Drop 45 began long before then.

Rock of Ages

If you drained today’s Great Lakes—or just looked closely at a modern bathymetry chart—you might notice that Lower Michigan sits in the middle of several rough concentric ridges. These erosion-resistant walls of rock mark ancient shorelines of a sea that shrank over hundreds of millions of years. The most prominent ring of this geological bull’s-eye, the Niagara Escarpment, arcs westward from the famous falls of the same name to a humbler formation in southeastern Wisconsin known as Brady’s Rocks. A portion of another ring, parallel to the Niagara Escarpment, is called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge (AAR) and cuts across what’s now Lake Huron. These ridges are truly ancient, even geologically speaking: They formed on the paleocontinent of Laurentia nearly half a billion years ago, and saw the dinosaurs come and go. During the last ice age, the AAR was largely buried under the ice, but it would have been largely high and dry during portions of the transitional postglacial period.

John O’Shea, who heads the University of Michigan’s underwater archaeology program, was attracted to the AAR as a potential study area more than 20 years ago. The ancient ridge, only a few miles wide in places, would have been a relatively stable feature on the landscape and, he thought, might have offered attractive camping and hunting sites to humans in the area.

During the last ice age, which peaked about 20,000 years ago, ice sheets scraped back and forth across what’s now the Upper Midwest. Paleolakes such as Algonquin, Stanley, and Chippewa—think of them as early drafts of the Great Lakes—formed during periods when glaciers were melting, and were reshaped as the ice retreated or advanced. All of this makes recreating the shifting landscape in any detail extremely challenging. “The glacier part is tricky,” says Lemke. “Glaciers erase all the evidence of former glaciers.”

Another process had even greater influence on the landscape once the ice retreated for good: Areas of bedrock, freed from the tremendous weight of mile-thick glaciers, bounced back, a process called isostatic rebound or adjustment. It continues today in many previously glaciated areas, including the Great Lakes region, and adds another variable to a complex, constantly changing set of systems. “That rebound isn’t even, it sort of hinges, so you’ve got this weird thing happening south to north,” says O’Shea. “As that plane is tipping back and forth, you’ve got different openings and closings and different lake outlets. This is why you have periods when you have a lot of water trapped there.”

As ice sheets steamrolled back and forth, lakes grew and shrank and filled again, rivers appeared and vanished, flora and fauna also changed—shifts can be documented by evidence such as ancient pollen. O’Shea calls it a landscape of “migrating ecotones,” or transitions between different kinds of environments. “There’s an ecological zone close to the ice front. It’s wet and tundra-like,” he says, adding that it would have been an attractive environment for cold-adapted animals, such as caribou, musk ox, and Arctic fox.

A satellite view of the North American Great Lakes; a submerged feature called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge is just to the right of image center, off the thumb of Lower Michigan. (JEFF SCHMALTZ, NASA/PUBLIC DOMAIN)

“As the ice moves north, the ecotone moves north … but this doesn’t happen overnight,” O’Shea says. “You get a succession of vegetation, from scrubs to spruce to pine. There’s a readvance of the ice so the pine goes away and the spruce comes back. Then you get mixed hardwoods.”

These shifts were not sudden, but the people living on the landscape would have been aware of them, similar to the way Arctic communities are experiencing permafrost melt and other consequences of climate change today. “You would have seen it on a generational basis, like ‘Oh, Grandpa used to hunt over there but now it’s a marsh,’” says Lemke.

At points early in the postglacial period, the AAR was a ridge flanked by tundra and wetlands. A little later, during a period roughly 9,000 years ago, the ridge would have formed a narrow land bridge between the two halves of Lake Stanley, the predecessor to Lake Huron. Migrating animals—likely including caribou—would have used this narrow corridor of dry land. And that made it attractive to humans. “The movement of animals would have been very predictable,” O’Shea says. “This would have been a tremendous thing for hunters.”

Unique Tools of the Trade

O’Shea, Lemke, and colleagues used an array of underwater survey techniques along the now-submerged AAR to identify the most promising areas. The remote survey tools, including advanced sonar, are now refined enough that they can reveal stone tools scattered across the lakefloor beneath layers of sediment, and human-built structures under smothering blankets of invasive mussels, which have overrun much of the Great Lakes. Once the surveys identified potential signs of human presence, submersibles and divers investigated the areas further. During their work, the team found several sites with hunting blinds or other human-made features, including the evocatively named Dragon Drive Lane. But Drop 45 appears to be the most complex site discovered so far.

The more the team learned about Drop 45, the more it surprised them. The site features multiple hunting blinds and a cleared, stone-lined lane that hunters used to funnel game toward them. Along with the other AAR hunting sites the team has identified, these structures are unique in the Great Lakes region—though similar hunting sites exist in the Arctic.

“Nobody had any idea that people were using that hunting architecture in the Great Lakes,” says Lemke. “It’s only because it’s underwater that those hunting structures are preserved. If they were on land, they wouldn’t look like much and people would just move them around.”

Several rock structures near Alaska’s Kuzitrin River are believed to have been used as ancient caribou hunting blinds. The remains of similar structures have been found in Lake Huron. (BERING LAND BRIDGE NATIONAL PRESERVE, CC BY 2.0/WIKIMEDIA)

The specific layout of the hunting blinds at Drop 45 suggests they were oriented to different directions caribou would have traveled during fall and spring migrations. The team recreated the landscape in a virtual reality setting and showed the site to traditional caribou hunters in Alaska. They confirmed how the drive lane and blinds would have been used, Lemke adds.

In addition to unique hunting structures, the stone artifacts retrieved from Drop 45 are unlike any others found in the Great Lakes region, raising questions about who the people hunting on the AAR were. We know they were not the first humans in the region: There are older archaeological sites around the Great Lakes, including the 12,000-year-old Gainey site, discovered near Detroit more than 40 years ago, and the Belson site in southwestern Michigan, described in 2021 and likely about as old.

The artifacts at both of those sites have been categorized as northern offshoots of the Clovis tradition, one of the earliest styles of toolmaking in the Americas. The distinctively fluted Clovis projectile points and other artifacts have been found across much of North America, but are fairly rare in the Great Lakes region. The artifacts found at Drop 45 and other sites along the AAR seem to have no connection to the Clovis tradition, however, and appear to belong to a previously unknown style, according to the team.

By about 8,000 years ago, as water levels rose, the AAR had become an archipelago, and eventually was fully inundated as Lake Huron filled. Caribou had moved out of the region, and evidence of the people adapted to hunting them vanishes from the archaeological record.

The team continues to explore the submerged landscape for more sites, including in areas adjacent to the AAR that would have been tundra before Lake Stanley formed. It will take multiple artifacts from multiple sites to understand who was in the area—and to convince some peers who believe the team’s findings are too speculative.

As O’Shea and his colleagues venture deeper into Lake Huron and the past, he’s hopeful but realistic about what they may find. “You can only approach this with humility. We’re talking thousands of years here,” says O’Shea. “We try to get together the pieces we can.”

This article How the Great Lakes formed—and the mystery of who watched it happen is featured on Big Think.

During the 1930s, the city of Rome asked Italian architect and archaeologist Italo Gismondi to build a 1:250 scale replica of the ancient city. His model, which was initially only planned to be shown at the 1937-1938 Mostra Augustea della Romanità exhibit, proved so popular with visitors that it was later put on permanent display at the Museum of Roman Civilization.

It was in this museum, in October 1976, that Bernard Frischer first saw Gismondi’s work with his own eyes. An archaeologist in training who had come to Italy as part of a postdoctoral fellowship in Classical Studies, Frischer already knew of the model, but descriptions failed to do the real thing justice. “I was blown away by its detail, its massive size (its largest dimension is about 60 feet), and the awesome sense it gave you of the unique grandeur of the Eternal City at the peak of its urban development in late antiquity,” he tells Big Think. As Frischer marveled at miniature versions of the Colosseum and the Pantheon, he daydreamed of turning Gismondi’s physical model into a virtual, life-size version of the city — one that would actually allow him to walk around in it.

Frischer presented the idea — which he dubbed “Project Cicero,” after the famous Roman statesman who defied Julius Caesar — at an Apple Computer conference in 1986, pitching it as not just a form of entertainment but also an educational tool. He proposed using artificial intelligence to populate the digital city with interactable avatars. Middle-school history lessons could be turned into a kind of video game, while professional researchers could turn to Project Cicero to study Rome’s architecture and urban planning — topics that are better explored inside a 3D space than on the pages of a manuscript.

When it comes to studying ancient history, Frischer explains:

“Nothing beats what we call autopsy or empirical observation of the remains on the site, in museums, and in excavation storerooms. During my first teaching job at UCLA, I felt the acute need to offer my students in the US a surrogate for such autopsy. Most of them had never been to Rome, and even if they had, they were there only for a brief time and saw just a handful of iconic sites. At the time, the solution teachers used was photography.

“But photographs have a number of insurmountable limitations: they show you the object of interest from a single point of view and under one lighting condition, which you cannot change. They show you the current state, or the condition, of the monument, not the way it looked hundreds or thousands of years ago when it was intact and part of the functioning city of ancient Rome.”

Reconstructing Rome

Like the Eternal City itself, Project Cicero was not built in a day. While the 1970s and 1980s saw rapid development in the fields of personal computers and rendering software, Frischer’s ideas proved too ambitious for the technology available at the time of their inception. His first plan of action, to manually scan the Gismondi model with help from the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory, failed because it was logistically impossible to transport the model to the lab and vice versa. Working with Apple Fellow Alan Kay, Frischer subsequently determined that the model wouldn’t look good if blown up to a 1:1 scale. If they were to create a virtual version of Rome, they would have to make it from scratch.

Actual work on Project Cicero, later renamed “Rome Reborn,” began around 1996 and involved a variety of methods. Frischer’s wish to illustrate the ancient city’s development from the late Bronze Age (c. 1000 BC) up to the early Middle Ages (550 AD) was abandoned in favor of a single point in time: 320 AD. During this year, Rome peaked in both population and cultural diversity. More importantly, many of the great structures erected during this time are still around today, making reconstruction easier and more accurate.

Buildings were split into two categories: Class I and Class II. Class I included buildings whose location, design, and dimensions are well known, either because they are still around today — i.e. the Pantheon and Colosseum — or because information on them has been preserved in important historical documents like De Roma Instaurata, a foundational treatise on ancient Roman topography by Italian Renaissance historian Flavio Brando. Class II buildings included buildings we regrettably don’t know much of, save for what has been written about them in the Regionaries, 4th-century catalogs compiled by city officials whose contents had to be assessed with scrutiny.

Additional details were gathered from archaeological sites or, in some cases, the proprietors of modern-day structures that now rest atop them. “The most time-consuming part of the project occurred whenever we had to get special permission to gather data about a certain location,” Frischer says. “For example, placement of the Altar of Augustan Peace [dedicated to the extended peace ushered in by emperor Augustus’ reign] and a corresponding obelisk involved tracking down the owner of the condemned building below which a piece of the pavement in front of the obelisk still survives. It took several years to do that and to build the relationship of trust that resulted in the owner kindly allowing us to do our study.”

Urban transformation

Although the first version of Rome Reborn was released in 2007, it by no means marked the end of the project. In addition to improving the model’s graphics, updates have incorporated discoveries from academics and archaeologists to ensure digital Rome is as faithful to its real-world counterpart as possible. For version 4.0, which came out in November 2023, added a host of noteworthy structures to the city, from the Aqua Claudia, an aqueduct built during the rule of the mad emperor Caligula, to the Baths of Agrippa, a thermae constructed by Augustus’ childhood friend and most trusted general.

The model, available on Yorescape — an app and website featuring in-depth virtual tours of sites in Greece, Egypt, and Mexico, among other places — gives an impression of just how far late imperial Rome had come from its humble beginnings in the 6th century BC. Back then, Nikoline Sauer, a postdoctoral research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, explains, “Rome housed around 50,000 inhabitants scattered across the Palatine, Capitoline and Velia Hills. The buildings of early Rome were more modest and made of perishable materials such as mud, wood, and clay. As the population grew and new materials became available, the city of the 4th century AD witnessed the emergence of buildings that were unimaginable in Early Rome. These structures included aqueducts, residential blocks, baths, and amphitheaters.”

Urban transformation was driven not just by cultural, economic, and political factors, but also by advances in technology. As Sauer tells Big Think:

“Central to these transformations were advancements in building materials, notably the Roman pioneering of concrete. This innovation enabled the construction of larger and more enduring structures. Simultaneously, advancements in engineering and construction techniques empowered the creation of increasingly ambitious and intricate structures.”

At the same time, remnants of archaic Rome remain embedded in its imperial future:

“Despite the notable differences, there are enduring architectural elements that have persisted in Rome from the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD. In Archaic Rome, we witness the inception of monumental temples, houses with foundations of stone and tiled roofs, the initiation of urban planning, and the establishment of fortifications. Essentially, the foundations of late imperial Rome were laid in Early Rome, nearly nine centuries prior.”

Geert Ham, a PhD candidate at the Institute for History at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, also sees traces of the past in the design of late imperial Rome. “Just as today, Romans back then lived amidst the accumulated constructions of earlier generations,” he tells Big Think, “and it is fascinating to see how emperors often drew strong inspiration from the past of their city, like Hadrian, who based his own monumental tomb on that of the founding emperor Augustus which stood just across the Tiber. In some cases, the opposite was also true: as the guided tour of the model explains, later emperors were eager to erase the visual memory of Nero from the city of Rome, and constructed bathing complexes, temples, and the famous Colosseum, where once stood Nero’s palatial Golden House, for which he had supposedly cleared space by setting Rome aflame in 64 CE.”

One small gripe Ham has with Frischer’s model is how green it is. Because plants and trees are perishable, it’s difficult to figure out how many of them grew in the ancient city. However, carbonized pollen preserved in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, interred under the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, suggest that flora was “limited to private gardens and other walled-off areas,” and not in the streets themselves.

A fresh perspective

As expected, recreating Rome inside a 3D space led Frischer’s team to discoveries that could not have been made through the conventional study of manuscripts or excavation sites. For example, archaeologists long questioned whether two monuments from the early imperial period, the aforementioned Altar of the Augustan Peace and the 100-foot tall obelisk of the Meridian of Augustus, were part of a single architectural project. A popular theory, proposed by German historian Edmund Buchner, was that the obelisk had been erected at a place where, on Augustus’ birthday, its shadow would reach the center of the Altar.

Linking the Rome Reborn model to a program called Stellarium, which lets you simulate and observe meteorological and astronomical phenomena in real time, Frischer was in a unique position to put Buchner’s hypothesis to the test.

Refuting Buchner’s claim, the experiment revealed that “the alignment of the monuments was to set up the awesome effect of standing on axis with the two monuments and seeing the solar disk touch the top of the obelisk, which occurred 239 days of the year. For the Egyptians, obelisks symbolized sunbeams. Calling himself the “son of Ra,” Augustus dedicated his obelisk to the sun god. As such, we concluded that the purpose behind the alignment was not to flatter the emperor on his birthday, but to revere the sun several times each year.”

Surely, this won’t be the last lesson Rome Reborn can teach us about the architecture and urban planning of the ancient city.

This article This virtual 3D model lets you wander the streets of ancient Rome is featured on Big Think.

Neanderthals are Homo sapiens’s closest-known relative, and today we know we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, up until the very end of their long reign some 40,000 years ago. Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse. Even today, their name is sometimes hurled at misbehaving members of our own species, though there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of prehistoric hooliganism.

Well, with one exception, perhaps: What they did in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France would certainly be frowned upon today. Hundreds of intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged into two large, ellipsoid structures and several smaller stacks, during a time when — as researchers confirmed in 2016 — only Neanderthals were roaming Europe. No one knows what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward creativity and perhaps even symbolism.

No other structures of this kind have so far been discovered. But there have been many other hints that Neanderthal minds were occupied with things many researchers did not expect, says archaeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria in Canada. The author of a 2021 book, Growing Up in the Ice Age, Nowell outlines the most exciting new discoveries in a 2023 article, “Rethinking Neandertals,” in the Annual Review of Anthropology.

“In the past 10 years, things have changed quite dramatically,” she says. “I never thought we’d have the wide range of information about their lives that we do now.” In addition to many new fossil discoveries, new methods for analyzing ancient biological molecules have allowed researchers to examine ancient DNA and proteins that they didn’t even know still persisted.

Most remarkably, researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biology, as well as our own — there is no longer any doubt that human beings and Neanderthals interbred. “Neanderthals are partly our ancestors, even if we didn’t evolve from them,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

In addition, the many freshly unearthed or newly analyzed artifacts, some now confidently assigned to Neanderthals thanks to improved methods for dating archaeological finds, make for quite a collection. “If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said there was quite a big gap in behavior, and Neanderthals would have lacked many of the complex behaviors we find in Homo sapiens,” Stringer says. “Now that gap has narrowed considerably.”

Here’s some of what we have gleaned from what our close relatives left behind when they roamed the Earth between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, across most of Eurasia.

Arts and crafts

Some of the Neanderthal artifacts discovered were very practical in nature. Bits of twisted wood fiber attached to a modified stone flake found in France in 2017 suggest that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make rope, for example, which may have opened the door to fashioning other objects like clothes, bags, nets and mats. There also is evidence that Neanderthals were heating birch bark to make adhesives — no mean feat. “A few researchers have recently tried to do the same in similar circumstances,” says Nowell, “and it’s a lot harder than most people thought.”

Beyond daily chores, Neanderthals evidently liked to adorn themselves. We now know they were using colorful pigments like red ochre as far back as 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, maybe not just on objects, but also on their own bodies — and they may have sometimes imported the substance from tens of kilometers away. Excavations have also revealed perforated and sometimes painted shells that were likely strung together and worn. A creative Neanderthal in Croatia made a necklace or other adornment out of white-tailed eagle talons, and elsewhere, tool marks found on bird bones suggest that feathers were also popular.

What about the famous cave art found in many sites in Europe and elsewhere? Until recently, none of these were thought to be Neanderthal. But in 2018, a study in Science demonstrated that the painted lines and dots on the walls of a number of caves in Spain must have been made by Neanderthals, since they were dated to a period when no Homo sapiens  were yet around. There also is evidence of engraving — “hashtags” carved into a cave wall in Gibraltar, as well as on a pebble, a flint flake and a giant deer’s toe bone.

There are no indications yet that Neanderthals created any recognizable depictions of, for example, animals or people, says Nowell. That may have been a Homo sapiens innovation. “There are so many of these little isolated examples of interesting things Neanderthals were doing, these sorts of pulses of symbolic behavior. But they don’t seem to last for long periods of time or lead to something else as they clearly have in Homo sapiens populations,” she says.

Growing up human

One explanation for the differences in artistic expression may be that Neanderthals just thought differently. Perhaps a member of our own species excitedly asking a Neanderthal why they drew or carved what they did would have received nothing but a shrug. It is, of course, very hard to reconstruct what differences there may have been in brain structure or cognition, but Nowell is intrigued by a number of recent studies in which human brain cells were engineered to contain Neanderthal versions of some key brain development genes.

When grown in dishes in the lab, clusters of cells engineered to have one of these Neanderthal gene variants developed into minute brain-like structures that had a more popcorn-like shape than Homo sapiens brain cells do, while those with sapiens genes were more spherical. In another study of a different brain development gene, the sapiens mini-brains formed more neurons in the same time period than mini-brains containing the Neanderthal version.

These findings certainly suggest that the genetic differences between our species affect the structure of our brains. Still, it’s hard to know what these differences mean, Stringer says, or even if those gene variants are truly Neanderthal. Studying a more genetically diverse sample of Homo sapiens today might reveal more variation in our own species, and possibly more of an overlap with Neanderthals, he says.

“I do think there were cognitive differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” says Nowell. But, she adds, differences in demography may also have created more obstacles for Neanderthal culture to flourish. Neanderthals were thin on the ground — their global population may never have numbered more than 100,000 at any point in time. Maybe ideas didn’t spread because Neanderthals were too isolated, Nowell says, and then disappeared when local groups died out. Homo sapiens reached much higher densities and would have had much larger social networks.

New evidence indicates that Homo sapiens kids probably had longer childhoods, too. “We think Neanderthal girls probably reached sexual maturity earlier,” says Nowell: Studies of relatively commonly found fossils of Neanderthal children suggest that newborns had larger brains than sapiens newborns do and that they were growing faster.

“A longer childhood allows children more time to learn and experiment in relative safety,” Nowell says, giving sapiens children an edge.

She also notes that learning doesn’t just mean making new neurons and connections: It also involves pruning away connections that don’t prove useful. So if young sapiens brains were producing more neurons than Neanderthal brains, as the experiments suggest, and if our childhoods also lasted longer, “this might have supported more extensive learning,” she says, with more room for trial and error and making and breaking connections.

In(ter)breeding

New studies have recently provided some intriguing snapshots of Neanderthal family life. An analysis of DNA from remains of 11 individuals found in Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia revealed that some were closely related and probably lived around the same time, says paleoanthropologist Bence Viola of the University of Toronto, who was involved in the excavation. “We’ve found a father-daughter pair, and a few individuals who either descended from the same mother or perhaps were mother, daughter and granddaughter.”

Genetic similarities were very high among all studied individuals, indicating that this was probably a very isolated population. “Men were even more highly related than women,” Viola adds, “suggesting it was probably more common for women to join a new group to find a mate.” This was probably the ancestral pattern in humans as well — it certainly still is in chimpanzees.

Though Neanderthals may have looked slightly odd to Homo sapiens, studies of ancient DNA show they did interbreed with our species. To Viola, that has important implications. “Homo sapiens clearly recognized Neanderthals as mating partners, which suggests they thought of them as humans — maybe ‘the weird guys living behind the mountains,’ but still, fellow humans,” he says. “More or less whenever both species extensively co-occurred, there has been genetic exchange.

An irresistible kiss

DNA may not have been the only thing our Homo sapiens ancestors exchanged with Neanderthals. Although our last common ancestor is thought to have lived at least 450,000 years ago, a 2017 study analyzing the DNA in calcified dental plaque on Neanderthal teeth showed that populations of a common microbe living in the mouths of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens genetically diverged at least 300,000 years later. This suggests that both species acquired the microbe from the same source around the same time — or somehow passed it to each other.

There are, of course, other possible explanations, such as shared food, says paleogeneticist Laura Weyrich of Penn State University, who led the study. “But the suggestion that it might have been a kiss proved irresistible to the media,” she says. “And you know, it might have been.”

That study also revealed other interesting aspects of Neanderthal behavior. The DNA analysis suggested that a Spanish Neanderthal with a dental abscess had likely been eating moldy plant matter covered in penicillin-producing fungus, as well as poplar bark containing pain-killing salicylic acid.

The study also cast significant doubt on the pervasive idea that all Neanderthals were staunch carnivores. While one Neanderthal from Spy Cave in Belgium had a fairly stereotypical diet of wild sheep and woolly rhino, the research revealed that this young adult also liked some mushrooms with their meal. “Neanderthals from El Sidrón Cave in Spain, on the other hand, didn’t seem to eat much meat at all,” says Weyrich. “Instead, it seems they mostly fed on mushrooms and, surprisingly, pine nuts.”

The lack of vegetables might be excusable — in a 2022 study, again based on the Neanderthal genome, an analysis of odor receptor genes found that Neanderthals would have been less sensitive to odors perceived as green, floral and spicy than we are. Yet at the site of Shanidar in current-day Iraq, researchers did find evidence that Neanderthals were cooking pulses such as lentils, while another recent study found grains of starch that suggest Neanderthals in Italy — of course — were making flour.

A Neanderthal nibbling pine nuts might sound like the pinnacle of flexibility, resilience and even good taste, but one gruesome detail needs to be mentioned here: Bones in El Sidrón also show signs of cannibalism. This may have had a cultural significance we are unaware of — rites involving cannibalism have existed in many cultures — but it doesn’t look as if the local population was thriving 50,000 years ago. (This is in stark contrast with a Neanderthal group in Germany 125,000 years ago that was apparently big enough to catch, butcher and eat elephants.)

Decline and persistence

Was cannibalism a sign of a species in decline, maybe even before Homo sapiens was making its first forays into Europe? It’s hard to say, but we have long wondered why Neanderthals went extinct and we didn’t. “Perhaps if Homo sapiens hadn’t been there,” Nowell says, “that niche would have stayed open for Neanderthals?”

There’s no evidence of any violence between Neanderthals and modern humans, Nowell adds; few researchers today seem to believe that Homo sapiens  was hunting down Neanderthals. A higher infant mortality rate may be part of the explanation, Nowell says. “Even a small difference can lead to population decline across generations.”

But what was it about Neanderthals that put them at a disadvantage — if they were? Might it just have been bad luck? “I think, as Homo sapiens numbers grew after 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals were already in trouble,” says Stringer. “The environment in this period was fluctuating constantly from nearly as warm as the present day to freezing cold, sometimes within a few decades.” All the vegetation would be changing, animals were moving. “Maybe Homo sapiens was better able to cope with those changes, because they were networking more, helping each other out or exchanging cultural knowledge,” he says.

Even without direct confrontation, it’s conceivable that Neanderthals would have been compelled to give way to Homo sapiens and ended up on the margins of what used to be their favorite places to be. Nevertheless, says Nowell, Neanderthals may have played a role in our success. Homo sapiens might have brought new technologies, but it’s possible they also learned skills from Neanderthals, who had lived in Europe for millennia.

Eventually, the remaining Neanderthals, living in shrinking groups with few, if any, attractive mates, many of them close relatives, might simply have decided to join a Homo sapiens group, and could well have been welcomed there, says Viola. And because of our interbreeding, something of Neanderthals still survives in us.

“There’s more Neanderthal DNA in the billions of humans alive today than there ever was when they were still around,” Viola says. “In a way, Neanderthals are still here.”

This article Neanderthals: More knowable now than ever is featured on Big Think.

Edward Teller truly detested Carl Sagan.

It was a contempt that burned late into the legendary physicist’s life, even after Sagan tragically passed away at the tender age of 62 from complications linked to bone marrow cancer in 1996.

“Who was he?” The 90-year-old Teller remarked when asked about Sagan in 1998. “He was a nobody!”

“What did he do? I know he criticized me — that is the only accomplishment of his that I know of … He never did anything worthwhile.”

A great many science fans would undoubtedly disagree with Teller’s assessment, especially those who enjoyed Sagan’s timeless television series Cosmos on PBS or read some of his many fantastic books, both of which instilled the wonders and benefits of scientific inquiry.

So why did Teller hate such a seemingly unhateable person? It almost entirely came down to a debate over thermonuclear weapons.

Teller, along with Stanisław Ulam, was instrumental in creating the hydrogen bomb and loudly advocated for nuclear weapon proliferation. He believed that nuclear war could be won and supported the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a system of satellites colloquially known as “Star Wars” that were touted to protect the U.S. from a barrage of incoming nuclear missiles. Teller’s infatuation with nukes was so great that he opposed any testing bans and even argued for using nuclear bombs to excavate dirt and defend Earth from asteroids.

On the other side of the debate was Sagan. The celebrated Cornell University cosmologist, fresh off the astounding success of Cosmos, sought to harness his newfound fame to advocate against nuclear weapons proliferation.

“Everyone knows it’s madness, and every country has an excuse,” he said.

Sagan lent his name and reputation to a 1983 study conducted by some of his former students that came to a disquieting conclusion: The firestorms and destruction wrought by nuclear war would send so much soot into the atmosphere that they would trigger catastrophic global climate change, blocking out the Sun and dropping global temperatures by as much as 25 degrees Celsius and triggering mass famine as crops failed across the world. They called the scenario “nuclear winter.” It meant that nuclear war was unwinnable. Humanity always loses.

In his book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan recalled that it was the most controversy he ever courted. Teller and others mercilessly attacked the paper as well as Sagan. “Teller called Sagan an ‘excellent propagandist’ and suggested that the concept of nuclear winter was ‘highly speculative,'” Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress wrote in their book Nuclear Choices for the 21st Century.

David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the former director of the Carl Sagan Center for Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute, described additional reasons for Sagan and Teller’s shared disdain.

“Edward Teller, who at age 73 was perhaps the second best-known scientist in the U.S., debated Sagan on nuclear winter before a special session of Congress. These confrontations generated deep personal animosity between them. Years later Teller told me about an airport breakfast that he and Sagan shared at this time, where (to Teller’s obvious distaste) three strangers came up to ask Sagan for his autograph, but no one seemed to recognize Teller.”

To his credit, Sagan offered a charitable analysis of Teller’s motives in his book The Demon-Haunted World:

“I see something more in his desperate attempt to justify the hydrogen bomb: Its effects aren’t as bad as you think. It can be used to defend the world from other hydrogen bombs, for science, for civil engineering … to wage war humanely, to save the planet from random hazards from space. Somehow, somewhere, he wants to believe, thermonuclear weapons, and he, will be acknowledged by the human species as its savior and not its destroyer.“

Today, the world is once again forced to contemplate nuclear armageddon in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The concept of nuclear winter, which so harshly divided Sagan and Teller, is still scientifically debated. Simulations suggest its effects could range from “mild” to devastating, depending upon the size of the nuclear conflict and the regions struck. Let’s hope we never endure its real effects.

This article Why the “father of the hydrogen bomb” hated Carl Sagan is featured on Big Think.

A vast city of 10,000 once stood within the grounds of Tel Zafit National Park. Now it is an archaeological dig, nothing but burned mud bricks, a crumbling break in the city’s defenses, and weapons cobbled together at the last minute from animal bones. What happened here? What force brought this great city to its end?  

According to the Bible, Gath was one of the main Philistine cities and the home of Goliath the Giant. Its destruction is glossed over, described in less than one verse of the Bible, in the book of 2 Kings. 

Archaeologists have long worked to figure out what happened to the ancient city of Gath, and just as important, when it happened. But dating sites like this is no straightforward task. Recently, a team of scientists led by Yoav Vaknin of Tel Aviv University tried a new method to date archaeological digs like Gath: They used the Earth’s magnetic field. Their results recently appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pole reversal

Deep within the Earth, thousands of miles below the crust, lies the boundary between the planet’s solid inner core and the molten outer core that surrounds it. That boundary burns at 6,000° C, hotter than the surface of the Sun. It is the hottest place on Earth.

In the outer core, massive currents of molten iron convect in giant cells around the inner core. Imagine water boiling on your stove — only on a much larger scale, and warmed by superheated liquid rock. This rock is made up of iron and nickel, and its motion creates the Earth’s protective magnetic field.

We can thank that magnetic field for a lot of things, including life. It helps shield the Earth, deflecting radiation up and around the planet. It protects our planet from solar winds and coronal mass ejections from our sun, as well as from cosmic rays. 

But since motion within the core is chaotic, the magnetic field is dynamic, too. In fact, the magnetic field of the Earth completely reverses — the North and South take turns being the pole of attraction. Sometimes the switch happens after tens of thousands of years, sometimes after tens of millions, but even when it is not reversing, the magnetic field of the Earth is constantly in flux. The North Pole travels about 45 km per year, its intensity gradually varying. 

The history of changes in the magnetic field is recorded in rock. Perhaps the most well-known record is etched in stone at the mid-Atlantic ridge. Here, new seafloor is constantly being created as the tectonic plates spread along fault lines as long as the ocean. As these molten rocks orient themselves, cool, and solidify, they record the direction and intensity of the magnetic field. A search of the seafloor allows us to read the history of the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

Surprisingly, this method can also be used for archaeological sites like the one at Gath. If rocks at these sites become hot enough, they too can align to show the intensity and direction of the magnetic field. Such heat can be generated during military actions, when widespread destruction is common. 

A magnetic history of biblical brutality

If you were an Israelite around 2,800 years ago, the name Hazael probably struck fear into your heart. In the book of 2 Kings, city after city falls to King Hazael. This ruler of Damascus leveled many cities in Judah and Israel. The prophet Elisha addresses Hazael in 2 Kings 8:12: 

“‘Why does my lord weep?’ asked Hazael. ‘Because I know,’ he [Elisha] replied, ‘what harm you will do to the Israelite people: You will set their fortresses on fire, put their young men to the sword, dash their little ones in pieces, and rip open their pregnant women.’” 

Many archaeological sites illustrate the brutality of Hazael’s campaigns. They tell the stories of how entire cities were destroyed, and Gath was one of these. Massive destruction is evident at the site, showing a long siege trench, fallen buildings, and human remains. 

Different approaches to date these sites lead to different conclusions. But one element in the destruction of these cities could help researchers. The battles were extensive and terrible, with widespread fires blazing at over 600° C. This heat baked the mud bricks in the cities, and aligned them with the Earth’s magnetic field. 

Vaknin and his team realized this, and they knew something else about the Earth during this time. While the magnetic field is continually changing, there are periods during which it fluctuates more quickly. This period was one of them, with fluctuations measuring twice as strong as their current propensity. “The dating resolution depends on the rapid fluctuations, so I am lucky to work on this period,” Vaknin told Big Think.

In short, the scattered fragments of ruins held the information researchers needed to determine exactly when these cities were destroyed.

Anchoring results in time

To use this data, the team gathered the information the mud bricks held about the direction and intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field, and they combined it with knowledge of other events whose timing is precisely known. These events are known as chronological anchors, and unfortunately, Vaknin says, they are rare.

 “The 701 [BCE] Assyrian campaign is my favorite example,” Vaknin says. “When the historical sources and the archaeological record match (more than 1000 arrowheads found in the destruction of Lachish, for example) — Bingo! We have an anchor.   

“We then compare the magnetic results from these anchors to those from other finds whose dates that are not as well known but are roughly dated to the same periods, according to other dating methods.”

Using their chronological anchors, they could create a timeline. They recorded the intensity and direction shown in mud bricks from 21 archaeological layers at 17 sites to discover exactly when each of these cities was destroyed. The team showed that several cities were destroyed around the same time — Tel Rehov, Horvat Tevet, Tel Zayit, and Gath. They suggest that all of these cities were destroyed by Hazael. 

The timing of the destruction of another city, Tel Beth-Shean, is often contested. Vaknin’s team studied this site and found that its bricks recorded a different magnetic field intensity and orientation than the other cities, suggesting that this Judean city was destroyed perhaps 70 to 100 years earlier, by Pharaoh Shoshenq I. The biblical account of still another ancient city, Tel Beth-Shemesh, suggests destruction at the hands of Jehoash, the King of Israel, and the team’s geomagnetic dating showed a timeline consistent with this interpretation. They also found that the Babylonian conquest of Judea was likely focused on Jerusalem. 

Piece by piece, the destruction of other sites has come into focus — some were leveled by the Babylonians, others by the Assyrians. Their method has allowed the team to trace the contours of the region’s chronology, suggesting the timeline of the falls of various parts of Judah and Jerusalem.

Especially in this part of the world and for this period of ancient history, geomagnetic dating is more precise than radiocarbon dating. This is thanks to the number of archaeological sites paired with the swiftness and strength shifts in the magnetic field. But the method can be used anywhere rocks were heated enough to align with the Earth’s magnetic field.

This article Earth’s magnetic field supports biblical stories of destruction of ancient cities is featured on Big Think.

Northern Canada is known for its blustery weather, dramatic landscape, and plentiful ice. But with an unprecedented thaw in Canada’s Mount Edziza Provincial Park the past few years, objects began emerging from the ice.

Some of the manmade possessions are 7,000 years old, and they belonged to the Tahltan First Nations. Mount Edziza, a volcano located in northwestern British Columbia, has remained a significant hunting ground for the Tahltan nation for thousands of years. With this discovery, archaeologists are now able to gain more insight into what life was like for people here since around 5,000 B.C.

There were containers crafted from birch bark, antler ice picks, tools carved from bones, walking sticks, and even a stitched boot. Among the artifacts discovered were also tools fashioned from obsidian, the black glass created by lava flows. Many others are made from materials such as leather, wood, and bone.

His team was initially blinded by the sparkling glass.

It’s a rare find, according to Duncan McLaren, lead archaeologist on the project. “There was such a high density of artifacts. We knew there was obsidian, but we didn’t realize until we had done this project that there were all these organic artifacts that were preserved around the obsidian,” he explains. McLaren says his team was initially blinded by the sparkling glass, but soon learned to train their eyes to find other artifacts.

These objects were so well-preserved and undisturbed in part due to their remote location. “This keeps visitor numbers low and also aids in the protection and preservation of artifacts,” says David Karn, commenting on behalf of the Ministry of Environment.

Within nine patches of ice, 56 objects were recovered overall. “Archeologists were able to carbon-date the organic materials, such as the digging sticks and leather items,” says Karn. “Carbon dating provides researchers with an idea of when the tools were made and how they were used.”

Of particular interest to researchers are two bark containers that are believed to be around 2,000 years old. One has detailed stitching along one edge that is still largely intact. The second container is more unique. Sticks are stitched to the inside of the container to reinforce the framework, creating a basket that could bear heavier loads.

The team also found an ice pick, carved from an antler, or ede’ in Tahltan, that was dated at around 5,000 years old—a useful tool for Indigenous residents of a cold, snowy region. Though one end appears to be broken, researchers were able to see the antler had been intentionally sharpened and shaped with a handle for ease of use.

The remains of a shoe, which McLaren describes as a moccasin-like boot, consists of complicated stitching and flaps—further evidence that early Tahltan hunters created complex items to thrive in the harsh climate of the region. Of note, says McLaren, is that the design hasn’t changed much through the millenia. “It is very similar to the types people have been wearing historically through the years,” he notes.

As to why these objects surfaced now after millennia encapsulated in ice, researchers attribute it to low snowpack in the region over several years. “It took us over five years to get the funding for this project,” says McLaren, who first began excavating the area in July of 2019. Now that the objects have been recovered, the team is working on study and preservation; the ancient items are very fragile. While housed in a climate-controlled provincial museum at the moment, McLaren says plans are underway to create a museum site in Tahltan territory that is capable of storing the artifacts safely.

The research team worked in conjunction with several other organizations, including the Obsidian Discoveries Tahltan Tene Mehodihi Youth Group Hike. Tene mehodihi translates to “the trail we know,” and the land-based education program seeks to educate Tahltan youth about the history of their nation through exploratory experiences such as this one.

Tene mehodihi translates to “the trail we know.”

“The findings further identify the archeological and cultural significance of the land encompassed within Mount Edziza Park,” says Karn. The Tahltan Central Government was not available for interview at this time, but tourism director Alex Buri says visitors should be aware of several things: Mount Edziza is extremely remote with a harsh climate, and visitors should consider hiring a local guide for exploration. The region is also extremely significant to the Tahltan First Nations people. Visitors should be respectful, not take any objects, and remember that artifacts are protected under provincial law.

This article Unusual boxes and 7,000-year-old trove found locked in ice is featured on Big Think.

Time has always been important to humans. Across cultures and civilizations, notes David Landes in Daedalus, “[people] have concerned themselves with time, if only to give cues and set bounds to social and religious activity … they have relied principally on repetitive natural phenomena.”

Yet when we transitioned from relying on the sun (or sand in hourglasses, or the Athenian water-clock), time and timekeeping became a luxury; the poor lacked clocks or servants to wake them. The alarm clock became a popular symbol for the way social organizations such as the workplace imposed their discipline on the population,” notes Shaul Katzir in The Journal of Modern History.

In Britain and Ireland, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new need for timekeeping as society moved from agriculture to mass-scale factory work. With urbanization, fewer people woke with the crow of the rooster or dinging of church bells. Instead, they relied on other people—“knocker uppers” or “knockers up”—to wake them; with destitution one shift away, many laborers could not afford to lose work at any cost. They relied on human alarm clocks who used fishing rod-like sticks, soft hammers, rattles, and peashooters to rouse the sleeping by rapping on their windows.

A knocker-up in Leeuwarden, (1947). (Wikimedia Commons)

The profession sounds absurd, but we’ve encountered the term “knocked up’ in this sense before. For one, Charles Dickens references the act of being “knocked up”’ in Great Expectations. In Chapter Six, Pip surmises that “Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad temper.” In an article aptly titled “‘Knocked Up’ in England and the United States,” Anne Lohrli notes that Dickens once published an article on ‘The Knocking-up Business.’ Published in Household Words, a journal Dickens himself edited, he describes his confusion at happening on a sign in a window that reads: “knocking up done here at 2d. a week.” Dickens, on establishing the profession wasn’t “‘getting up’ of some portion of a lady’s dress” labeled it a “novel branch of the manufacturing industry.”

These people—knockers-up or knocker-ups (both plurals are used in various articles)—were an integral part of the societies they served. So much so, that in a 1917 article about Homeric hymns, author T. L. Agar makes a passing comparison to knocker-uppers when writing about employment amongst the Greeks: “It is well known that in our manufacturing towns the work-people regularly employ a knocker-up who goes round betimes to waken them every morning.” Agar goes on to conclude that a knocker-upper is a “superannuated workman,” presumably because the working class is entirely dependent on them.

Similarly, in an article that summarizes a history of Ireland’s County Louth, published in Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, James Garry acknowledges the role of the “’knocker-up’ woman,” cautioning, “let us not forget [her].” Garry notes that the knocker-up in Louth was one Betty McEntee, “who lived in Toberboice Lane in the last decades of the nineteenth century” and that each household paid “three old pennies per week” for this service.

This rate was higher in places like London, where the the knocker-upper had to contend with cost of living and commuting. One well-known knocker-upper, Mary Smith, earned sixpence a week in the 1930s. In fact, such was the prominence of Mary Smith that in 2003 Andrea U’Ren wrote a children’s book about her, with educators dubbing her a “strong female character.”

But while both men and women were engaged as knocker-uppers, the job afforded women a significant degree of financial independence. An 1878 Canadian newspaper article documentsthis, highlighting the tale of one Mrs. Waters. A knocker-upper from a northern English town, Waters afforded her only son’s education and “maintained” an invalid husband. Waking as early as 2:30 AM, “in all weathers,” she sustained a roster of at least eighty clients through her thirty-year career, earning thruppence (3p) from the majority of her clients but sometimes as much as half-a-crown (30 old pence).

Yet, not everyone viewed this profession as the key cog it was in industrial Britain—including celebrated social reformer Helen Dendy. Dendy referred to this class of people brought to the forefront during the Industrial Revolution as “the Residuum,” and grouped knocker-uppers with “the girl who cleans steps [and] the old woman who minds babies.” Her view of this class was entirely negative. To Dendy, they were unworthy of charitable aid, since they were people “who suffer[ed] from an exaggerated abhorrence of that regular work,” compared to “true industrialists,” who worked in factories and mills.

This article How alarm clocks put knocker-uppers out of business is featured on Big Think.

As the editor-in-chief of the online magazine The Public Medievalist and research specialist at the Smithsonian Institution, Paul Sturtevant often holds public talks about medieval Europe. In an article, he said his favorite part of these talks is answering interesting questions from the audience. Usually, he has an answer ready before the speaker can finish their train of thought, but one question took him by surprise.

During a lecture on pop-culture representations of the legendary English outlaw Robin Hood, a “perfectly normal-seeming man” with a “twinkle in his eye” stood up and asked: “What if it’s all a lie?” The man, Sturtevant explained, turned out to be an adherent of the “phantom time hypothesis,” a pseudo-historical conspiracy theory that claims the years 614 to 911 A.D. never happened and that every single historical artifact dated from this period is a lie.

The origins of phantom time

The phantom time hypothesis is the brainchild of Heribert Illig, a German publisher and amateur historian who gained attention following the publication of his controversial 1996 bestseller Das erfundene Mittelalter: Die grösste Zeitfälschung der Geschichte, which translates to The Invented Middle Ages: The Greatest Time-Falsification in History.

During his investigation, Illig compared the dating of the Julian calendar (implemented by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C.) to that of the currently used Gregorian calendar (introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 A.D.). He claims that, by his calculations, some 297 years appear to be missing.

But Illig doesn’t stop there. He then argues that these missing years were secretly added as part of a plot hatched by Pope Sylvester II and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. Living during the 8th century A.D., these medieval elites allegedly wanted to speed up time so that their respective reigns would correspond with the year 1000: exactly one millennium after the birth of Jesus Christ.

To hide their tinkering from future generations, Otto and Sylvester employed scribes to create and copy medieval manuscripts detailing fictitious events and individuals. After being distributed to monasteries and libraries across Europe, these manuscripts would be mistaken for actual history. Among their fabrications, Illig asserts, were such famous historical figures as Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the so-called “Founder of Europe,” and Alfred the Great, the King of England who drove off the Vikings.

Illig isn’t the only writer to call the Middle Ages an invention, though. His Eurocentric version of the phantom time hypothesis exists alongside a Russocentric one. Propagated by Moscow State University mathematics professor Anatoly Fomenko, it posits that classical Greece, imperial Rome, dynastic China, pharaonic Egypt, and other ancient societies actually existed during the Middle Ages, and that civilization didn’t get going until 800 A.D.

Fomenko’s adjusted calendar creates an equally warped version of the past, one in which the New Testament was written before the Old, the Trojan War and the Crusades were the same conflict, and Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were the same person.

Debunking the hypothesis

Like most lies, the phantom time hypothesis contains a small kernel of truth. For instance, the vast majority of early medieval manuscripts are copies of lost originals, casting doubt on some of their exact details. It’s also true that the European calendar has been revised on multiple occasions, with many a mathematically inclined monk tramping through a theological minefield to find the appropriate dates for Christmas, Easter, and other religious holidays. Finally, it’s true that much of history, particularly ancient and medieval history, was written by victors. All historical accounts must be studied with a healthy dose of scrutiny and skepticism, calendars included.

But the phantom time hypothesis falls apart the moment you take a closer look. While the European continent may not have many original manuscripts from the early Middle Ages, documents and artifacts from Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas provide overwhelming proof that these missing centuries did indeed happen.

Evidence of the missing centuries can also be found in nature. Tree rings chronicle the passage of time, and ancient and medieval documentations of astronomical events like solar eclipses show that their observers lived in different periods.

Discussing why the phantom time hypothesis was created, and why it remains so appealing to many non-academics, historian and editor of Perspectives on History Leland R. Grigoli turns to politics and ideology. Just as the German hypothesis refuses to acknowledge a period when European society stagnated while others flourished, so does its Russian counterpart assert that the history of civilization began with the birth of Russia’s parent state, the fiefdom of Kievan Rus’.

“The [phantom time hypothesis],” Grigoli writes, “is also a product of some very long-lived ghosts which continue to haunt medieval studies. It is based, for example, in a myopic, nationalist Eurocentrism that has long defined the field, one which forgets (or does not believe) that there is any premodern history outside of Europe.”

Scholarship versus conspiracy

The phantom time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory posing as serious scholarship. While it can raise interesting questions — “In a pre-modern age,” asks Sturtevant, “could it have been possible for humanity to just forget a day? A month? A year?” — the hypothesis quickly spirals out into yet another paranoid fever dream about the shadowy elite who control and alter reality behind the backs of their constituents.

Despite its sheer implausibility, the hypothesis has proven difficult to refute. This is partly because conspiracy theories are more emotional than logical; belief in the three missing centuries can hardly be dispelled through facts because it is based, first and foremost, on a deeply rooted mistrust of authority.

Then there’s the nature of the phantom time hypothesis itself. As journalist Rex Sorgatz notes in his book The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, “Every bit of counter-evidence (astronomical records, archaeological remains, carbon dating, etc., etc., etc.) offers a new plot from a crypto-historian. Each historical refutation requires another for its support, leaving an entire chronological framework susceptible to implosion. No matter how convinced you are that Charlemagne existed, can you prove it?”

A valid point. But then again, can you prove he didn’t?

This article “Phantom time hypothesis”: Did a power-hungry pope fabricate centuries of history? is featured on Big Think.

Rising above Athens, the Acropolis is the temple complex from the ancient Greek world. The Periclean building campaign that resulted in the iconic Parthenon and other structures of the Acropolis defined the “golden era” of classical Athens. Today, it’s one of the most important tourist destinations in the city. And while you can find many images of visitors posing in front of the Parthenon, there’s another temple of the Acropolis whose irregularities are still of great debate today.

While the Parthenon embodies the ideals of perfection the Greeks sought from architecture during the Classical period, the Erechtheion is more unusual. Split across two elevations, the Erechtheion is essentially two temples squished into one. Its eastern portico, sitting on higher ground, marks the entrance to the portion of the temple dedicated to Athena Polias. A revered olive-wood statue of the goddess was housed in its cella (the inner room of the temple). The northern portico is about ten feet lower than the eastern one and serves as the entrance to the western section of the temple. There one finds shrines to Poseidon-Erechtheus, Hephaistos, and Boutes. This unexpected layout challenges the Greek canon of the perfectly arranged, symmetrical temple.

So why does the Erechtheion look the way it does? Well…it’s complicated. And scholars are still debating it.

One leading theory, writes historian Henrik Gerding, “is that the architect behind the Erechtheion wanted to combine the Temple of Athena Polias with other shrines and religious tokens related to the birth of the city.” Though replacing the old Temple of Athena Polias destroyed by the Persians in the sacking of Athens in 480 BCE, the Erechtheion wasn’t an exact copy. Far from it! As with the original, it would serve as the home of the cult statue of Athena Polias and be the main shrine to her. But it would also reference the competition between Athena and Poseidon to be the patron god of Athens (hint, hint, Athena won). The three-part western shrine honors Poseidon-Erechtheus (Erechtheus was the mythical founding king of Athens), Boutes (Erechtheus’s brother), and Hephaistos, the god of fire and forge. The design of the Erechtheion thus honors the old Temple of Athena Polios while incorporating the mythology of the birth of Athens.

Further complicating the temple’s design is its placement within the Acropolis. On the Erechtheion’s southern side stands the Porch of the Maidens, with its six caryatids (statues of women serving as columns) gazing across to the Parthenon. Between the Porch of the Maidens and the Parthenon is the space that once was home to the old Temple of Athena Polias. Why not just replace the old Temple of Athena, instead of building the unusual Erechtheion?

The classical archaeologist and art historian Gloria Ferrari Pinney looked to the “Oath of Plataea” as an explanation for this perplexing space. In this oath, the Greeks “pledged never to rebuild the shrines of the gods destroyed by the barbarians.” The ruins of the old templeremained as an eternal reminder of the devastation wrought by the Persians on the site. Ferrari writes that “[f]ar from being unsightly rubble, the ruin at the heart of the Acropolis functioned as the point of relay to which the other buildings responded.”

Knowing this context helps us understand the Erechtheion’s unusual placement and layout, especially when considering the massive building campaign seen atop the Acropolis at the time it was being built.

However, Gerding hypothesizes that the disposition of the Erechtheion relates more to the overall use of space within the Acropolis than a concern with memorializing the Persian invasion. He argues that, in deciding to the Erechtheion just north of the site of the original Temple of Athena Polias, “the principle aim must have been to create a larger and centrally placed open space on the Acropolis for the gatherings of people.” As crowds for the annual Panathenaic procession grew, a larger space was needed to allow worshippers to gather in front of the Great Altar. Moving the Erechtheion to the north and giving it an unexpected layout would have achieved this goal.

While scholars continue to debate the motivations behind the Erechtheion’s design, what remains is an unusual Greek temple whose differences are only heightened by its proximity to the perfectly proportioned, utterly iconic Parthenon.

This article You’ve heard of the Parthenon. But what about the Erechtheion? is featured on Big Think.

If you’re a person of note concerned with your legacy, you probably want a good epithet. Epithets are, in a nutshell, historical autobiographies. They are the summation of a life in one or a few words. So, securing a good epithet is key if you want future generations to remember you well. You want something like John the Good, John the Wise, or John the Sleek. But sometimes history is not so kind, and the chroniclers will slander your name with a tarry brush of ignobility. We’ll read about John the Terrible, John the Bootlicker, or John the Cow Turd.

For most people who don’t know the minutiae of world history, an epithet is all we’ve got to go on. When we read about Alexander or Darius the Great, we assume they’re pretty good at their jobs. If your name is Charles the Mad or James the Shit, then we can guess you made a few enemies in your time.

Occasionally, history will give up an epithet that needs explaining. Here we look at the stories behind four of the most peculiar and often comical epithets in history.

Æthelred the Unready

Imagine a seven-year-old boy playing in the garden with a wooden sword. It’s 978 AD, and while Saxon Britain isn’t exactly a pleasure garden, a kid is still a kid. Into the garden walks an armor-clad, sword-carrying, blood-stained warrior. He kneels.

“My Lord Æthelred,” he says. “Your mom told us to murder your brother. You are now king.”

That’s not a great start to your royal career, but things will get better, right? Well, no. Poor little Æthelred has to face the most powerful Viking force the region has seen in a century. On his tiny shoulders and with his wooden sword, the war-weary Saxons need to repel the Scandinavian hordes. I think most seven-year-old boys would be “unready.”

But “unready” in 10th-century Britain did not mean what it means today. Unready derives from unræd, which means “bad counsel” or “folly,” and so Æthelred the Unready actually just means he had awful advisors. And there was a lot of unræd going around. Æthelred floundered from defeat to defeat and never really got his court in order. Under Æthelred, Britain very nearly became entirely Viking.

Ivalo the Swineherd or Ivaylo the Cabbage

Viking berserkers and British weather are pretty bad, but they’re a cup of tea compared to what Bulgaria faced in the 13th century. Bulgaria was caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock was the Byzantine Empire, and the hard place was thousands of implacable Mongolian horse archers.

The then-Bulgarian Emperor Constantine Tikh was an incompetent lump whose only skill seemed to be getting his armies killed. Anyone could have done better than him. And that anyone was Ivaylo. Ivaylo was a peasant who, as you can guess, herded swine. He gathered together a group of other disillusioned farmers, and they marched to defend their land. Somehow, armed with little more than pitchforks and pigstink, they managed to beat back the Nogai Mongols.

Of course, Constantine Tikh was having none of this. He directed his ordered rows of professional troops northward to put down Ivaylo’s peasant revolt. And true to his inept record, Constantine Tikh was soundly defeated. It was even said that Ivaylo himself killed the emperor.

Sadly, the story ends poorly for our resourceful pigkeeper. Faced with a full invasion by the Byzantines, Ivaylo petitioned the Nogai to be their puppet king. They decided, instead, to murder him. Ivaylo was immortalized as The Swineherd or The Cabbage — a sneering, priggish, classist putdown. Today, it makes him seem cooler.

Mithridates the Poison King

Say what you want about the Mongols, but when they killed you, at least they stabbed you in the front. Some cultures, though, prefer poison. Mithridates VI of Pontus was of one such culture. Pontus was an ancient empire located in what we now call northern Turkey and was one of Rome’s most determined enemies.

Mithridates’ dad was killed by poison, and so, as a young prince, Mithridates ran out into the wilderness to embark on an anti-poison regime of microdosing. He would ingest, inject, and infuse every known poison in the ancient world to build immunity to them. When he became ruler, he carried on his obsessive and paranoid routine — especially arsenic — because that’s what killed his dad. Mithridates would take condemned criminals and, like some Turkic supervillain, force them to take this or that lethal concoction to make sure his doses were dialed in.

Then came a rather ironic twist. When the Roman general Pompey decisively defeated the Pontic armies, Mithridates tried to kill himself. He tried to poison himself. After a few hours of awkwardly sitting around and surviving, Mithridates told his guard to just stab him in the chest. That did the job.

Microdosing, today, is still called “Mithridatism,” and it’s effective for certain poisons. Given that alcohol is technically a poison, the next time you have a glass of wine, you can nerdily tell your company you’re just trying to honor the late Poison King of Pontus.

Halfdan the Bad Entertainer

When you’re a Viking, you raid hard and you play hard. After a good season of plunder and pillage, you want to come home to a mead hall packed with bawdy songs and roasting meat. If you spend so much of your life in the shivering cold, risking your life, you want to celebrate the living part.

So, if your chief happens to be somewhat joyless on that front, you’re going to let him know. Halfdan Olafsson, King of Uppsala, wasn’t a bad ruler. His raids were successful and his lands were secure. His men were rich and their share of the loot was given in good time. In happier times, he was known as Halfdan the Mild.

The problem? Vikings do not live by gold alone, and Halfdan was notoriously spartan in his celebrations. “Darling, did you enjoy Halfdan’s party last night?” your Viking wife might say. “Thor’s left nut I did! He gave us one piece of black bread, and I’ve crapped bigger pigs than the one he roasted.”

The Vikings were fans of a good epithet and even bigger fans of making fun of you. Sadly for Halfdan, and despite all his fights and all his wisdom, it’s his mocking and miserly epithet that we remember him for.

This article 4 of history’s most bizarre epithets is featured on Big Think.

The oldest unambiguous use of the F-word comes from De Officiis, a treatise on moral conduct by Cicero. No, the Roman philosopher didn’t gift English its soon-to-be favorite obscenity. Rather, in 1528, an anonymous monk scrawled this parenthetical into the margins of a De Officiis manuscript: “O d fuckin’ Abbot.”

It isn’t obvious whether the monk’s remark aimed to belittle the abbot or reference his less-than-celibate hobbies. Either way, it seems brazen to us today that a 16th-century monk would scribble such fresh language in a book like some edgelord middle schooler. And it was brazen, too, but not for the reasons you may think.

That lone “d” served as a stand-in for damned — as in “Oh, damned fuckin’ abbot.” This bit of self-censorship reveals that in the Middle Ages, the unmentionable indecency wasn’t the F-word. It was flippantly evoking matters of religious significance. In fact, this medieval mindset still hangs on in our contemporary euphemisms for vulgar language, such as swearing, profanity, and curse words. 

A century later, the roles would begin to reverse. One obscenity would transform into a PG-rated curse, while the other would ascend to become the naughtiest of naughty utterances. It’s all part of the weird and mysterious history of this infamous four-letter word.

Where did the F-word come from?

Etymologists aren’t entirely sure where the word originated. It must have been in use for it to appear in our monk’s saucy marginalia, but if we push past 1528 and deeper into written history, things start to get blurry.

In 1503, for example, William Dunbar, a Scottish court poet and ordained priest, penned this dirty ditty: “He held fast, he kissed and fondled, / As with the feeling he was overcome; / It seemed from his manner he would have fucked! / ‘You break my heart, my bonny one.’” In the original Scots, Dunbar’s rhyme scheme was to pair chukkit (“fondled”) with fukkit (“fucked”), showing the word had taken also root in English’s sister language.

Another early instance comes from a 1475 poem written in an English-Latin hybrid: “Non sunt in celi / quia fuccant uuiuys of heli.” Translation: “They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of [the town of] Ely.”

The word certainly goes back further still and we see hints of its usage — and the more relaxed attitudes surrounding it — in the names of people and places. A favorite picnic spot could be labeled “Fucking Grove” on the map and no one would think twice about it. And people from the 1200s signed documents with monikers such as “Henry Fuckbeggar” and “Simon Fuckbutter.”

In fact, Chester County documents reveal that between September 1310 and May 1311, one “Roger Fuckebythenavele” was called to court three times before being “outlawed.” (Historians can only guess as to his crimes.)

From there, the etymological trail goes cold. People have proposed various theories regarding the word’s origin, some more absurd than others. One popular theory is that the word is an acronym for “fornicate under the command of the king.” But this idea supposes that everyone in Merrie England went around fornicating until the king commanded them to do it so often they had to coin a shorter term. Unlikely.

In Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, a book this article is greatly indebted to, linguist John McWhorter offers two more likely scenarios. The first is that our F-word comes from an Old English one now lost to us. Neither a gratifying nor surprising answer. As McWhorter points out, we only have about 34,000 Old English words, compared to the roughly 225,000 you’ll find in a standard desk dictionary. What’s more, the Old English texts that have survived are mostly official or religious documents.

Another possibility is that the word was on loan from another language. Various Germanic words have been floated as possible contenders, among them ficken (meaning “to make quick movements to and fro, or flick”). McWhorter suggests another candidate in the now obsolete Norwegian word fukka.

As this theory goes, the Vikings’ invasion of England wasn’t a hit-and-run operation. Many stayed and settled. They started farms, took English wives, and became part of the culture. Naturally, their word for such a common activity came with them and blended into the local vernacular. This theory may also explain Dunbar’s fukkit as the Vikings heavily settled Northumbria (a kingdom that once consisted of the North of England and south of Scotland).

“We will likely never be absolutely sure which of these origin stories is the right one,” McWhorter writes. “Overall, however, our word shall likely ever remain the mysterious little fuck that it is, turning up off in a corner of the lexical firmament sometime after the Battle of Hastings.”

A big effing deal

Even after the 16th century, the English language doesn’t use the word much — in print at least. 

“In the 1500s and before, it was, to be sure, naughty,” McWhorter writes. “[However] since the Renaissance, fuck has been the subject of a grand cover-up, the lexical equivalent of the drunken uncle or the pornography collection, under which a word known well and even adored by most is barred from public presentation.”

For instance, the first dictionary to include the word was Queen Anna’s New World of Words, an Italian-English dictionary printed by John Florio in 1598. It wouldn’t appear in a general English dictionary until 1966 when The Penguin Dictionary broke the taboo. The American Heritage Dictionary wouldn’t offer the F-word entry until 1969, and even then not without also printing a “clean” edition to compensate. A notable exception to this rule was John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775).

One reason for the word’s conspicuous absence has to do with the nature of the written word. For most of history, the majority of people could neither read nor write. Those who could were often the social elite, and they wrote for other elites. To further separate themselves from the bawdy riffraff, they coded their language to mark their status. One way to do that was to not use the obscene language associated with the lower classes — except maybe in omission, and always from the safe distance of the moral high ground. 

As print and literacy became more widespread, these norms remained firmly entrenched. Most historical examples come to us from underground entertainment, such as folk songs, erotic comics, and pulpy literature.

However, the social, cultural, and artistic aftershocks of the two World Wars began to slowly nudge profanity back into print. In the 1924 play What Price Glory?, the soldiers swore like, well, soldiers, but without dropping a single F-bomb. Ernest Hemingway included damn in The Sun Also Rises (1926) but had to settle for the oblique muck in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). And Norman Mailer famously substituted fug in The Naked and the Dead (1948).

The watershed moment wouldn’t come until 1960, with the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. D.H. Lawrence’s now-revered novel was initially banned or censored across the English-speaking world for its use of the word and explicit sexual descriptions. In the U.K., Penguin Books, the novel’s publisher, was brought to trial for violating the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The prosecution argued the novel would “deprave and corrupt” readers, but the jury found Penguin not guilty on account that such literature fell under the act’s public good provision.

Other courts soon followed, and the novel is today viewed as a milestone in the counterculture movements that would usher in our more permissive social mores.

Evolution of the F-word

Since then, things seem to have come full circle. Once unutterable in polite society, the word has lost much of its stigma and can now be heard in the office, on TV, and even at the family dinner table (assuming the kids are playing in the other room).

As linguist Valerie Fridland points out, it is 28 times more common in literature today than when Lawrence wrote of Lady Chatterly’s illicit affair — to say nothing of its marquee status in titles. It’s the most tweeted cuss word by Americans, and in a truly stunning upset, it recently surpassed bloody as the favored obscenity among the British.

“This suggests that something has changed over the decades that has made such language less offensive, at least to a significant portion of the population,” Fridland writes. “And, even more than just an uptick in use, what is especially striking is how omnipresent even more offensive ‘bad’ words have become.”

A 2023 study looked at the word’s usage among British teens over several decades. It found that the word has undergone “delexicalization,” the process by which a word expands its range of contextual uses different from its original meaning. In this case, the word has become more functional than definitional. Much like that anonymous monk of yore, we use it today for that kick of expressive spice.

Fridland, who was not involved in the research, offers the example, “It’s fucking hot in here.” This usage no longer carries any literal meaning. It’s there to amplify and emphasize just how hot it is. She writes: “By picking a word that has some shock value and takes a bit of verbal risk owing to its associated taboo use, it carries more impact. […] As swear words get put to work in less traditional/literal ways, their negative connotations are less likely to be the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing them.”

Even so, in some settings or groups, the word hasn’t completely lost its edge, and that’s for the best. We need words that give our expressions that emotional oomph and inform others just how disgusted, ecstatic, or angry we are. We need to be able to signal when our social hair is down or that we’re part of the in-group. And sometimes, we just need an easy way to distinguish the pastors from the shock jocks. 

Should the day ever come when the word no longer fulfills these roles — hitting instead with all the impact of a “golly gee” — you can bet another one will step up to take its place. Until then, it will continue to evolve in our language in ever-resourceful and interesting ways.

* Correction: An earlier version of this story said that the F-word didn’t appear in an English-language dictionary until 1966. The paragraph has been updated to note an exception and offer clarity.

This article A very short history of the F-word is featured on Big Think.

On August 24, 79 AD, around noon, Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the nearby Roman settlements of Pompeii and Herculaneum in plumes of blistering hot smoke. One of the biggest and most famous natural disasters of the ancient world, the eruption is thought to have killed close to 16,000 people. At the same time, the volcanic ash expelled from Vesuvius’ bowels preserved countless murals, artifacts, and — in the case of Herculaneum’s Villa dei Papiri — even the contents of an entire library.

“It really is an amazing combination of circumstances that allowed its preservation,” Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, told Big Think. “The villa was at exactly the right distance from the volcano. The temperature was neither too hot nor too cold. Had it been any cooler, the eruption would have set it on fire. Instead, it carbonized everything — not only the papyri, but all kinds of organic material. And then came a mudflow, sealing the whole thing off from bacteria or other destructive agents.”

According to Fowler, the Villa dei Papiri is the only classical library to survive in its entirety, and its contents include many a text that was believed to have been lost to time. There are several parts of On Nature, the magnum opus of the life-affirming philosopher Epicurus, as well as excerpts of On Vices and Virtues, written by his student, the poet Philodemus. The library is also thought to contain up to a third of all 700 works of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, whose oeuvre was once thought to have been completely destroyed.

The library’s scrolls — some 1,100 in total — are a dream come true for any Hellenist. That is, if only we could read any of them. Although the warm embrace of Vesuvius protected the scrolls from iconoclasts and pathogens, it also caused them to carbonize and crumple up. Attempts to unroll the scrolls following their discovery in the mid-1700s resulted in their partial, at times near-complete disintegration – a fate Fowler attributes, rather optimistically, to over 80% of the library’s initial contents.

Previous generations of researchers employed scribes to peek into the rolled-up centers of the scrolls and copy what bits of text they were able to recognize – a task eventually relegated to CT scanners. People hoped modern technology could solve the mystery in seconds; instead, the scanners performed even more poorly than the human eye had done. This, explains, software engineer Luke Farritor, is because “the ancients used soot from their candles as ink, and when the papyrus got burned, the whole thing turned into soot,” making the ink largely undetectable.

Since CT scanners can only pick up on magnetic signals, and carbon is completely non-magnetic, researchers needed a different type of technology to decipher the scrolls. Farritor, an undergraduate student from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, provided. He is one of hundreds of contestants who are participating in the so-called Vesuvius Challenge, a public competition to reconstruct the Villa de Papiri using AI. He is also a leading contestant for its $700.000 Grand Prize, to be awarded at the end of this month.

Inside the Vesuvius Challenge

The Vesuvius Challenge, launched at the start of 2023 by University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales and funded by Silicon Valley investors like Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman, has but one objective: to develop and train an artificial intelligence model capable of turning the fossilized ink back into discernable letters and save the library’s contents from extinction.

While some contestants work with fully-fledged models of their own, others create code for smaller, more specific tasks. One of the award-winners (there are many honors aside from the top prize), Tom Wei, focused on the task of segmentation. “Because the Herculaneum scrolls are tightly rolled up and the inner layers only visible in the form of CT volumes,” he told Big Think, “it’s necessary to digitally ‘unroll’ these layers so that AI models can visualize the flattened ink signal. What makes my code special is that it places heavy emphasis on scalability and automation, being an intelligent tracing algorithm rather than a fully supervised workflow.” In the future, he hopes segmentation can be achieved by algorithms with little no to human supervision.

The Vesuvius Challenge is not an individual race so much as it is a relay, with the discoveries of one coder enabling the breakthroughs of another. One person many contestants mention being indebted to is Casey Handmer, who was among the first to locate significant portions of ink. Handmer’s eureka-moment came when, while surveying the inside of the scrolls with their own eyes, they observed a kind “crackle pattern” which, after going back in with the computer – “very basic image manipulation code, nothing more sophisticated than Photoshop,” they say – turned out to be lettering.

Farritor, inspired by Handmer’s crackles, began using them to train his machine-learning model. With each new bit of crackle discovered, his model became better and better at reconstructing the text – so much so that one night, while Farritor was out at a party, he picked up his phone only to find “three Greek letters on my screen I had never seen before.” The advancement put him within spitting distance of the Vesuvius Challenge’s First Letters Prize, awarded to the first individual to find 10 letters in an area of 4 square centimeters, which he ended up winning in October. Second place went to Youssef Nader, a biorobotics grad student from Berlin, whose own discovery took place moments after Farritor’s.

The next page

After the first letters had been found, they were presented to a team of linguists and historians for verification. Featured on the team was Fowler, who walked Big Think through the submissions of both contestants. “Porphyras,” he declares, tracing his cursor over the AI-generated text imposed on an original piece of scroll. It means “purple,” though, because the rest of the sentence is missing, it is unclear whether the word was used as a noun (i.e. “cloths of purple”) or adjective (“purple dye”).

Other words followed. Elsewhere in the library’s digital assets, Fowler points towards a group of markings that, he says, spell out the word “music.” Perhaps it’s part of a treatise on the subject. Perhaps that treatise was written by Philodemus, who seems to be one of the best-represented authors in the villa, as well as its possible owner.

Time will tell whether any of this is true. For now, contestants are concerned with the grand prize, awarded to the first person to produce not one but four separate passages from two scanned scrolls. “I’m not yet there,” Farritor admits, “but I’m optimistic I’ll be able to get there soon. I’ve been working day and night on winning that thing.”

This article Vesuvius Challenge: Can AI decipher these mysterious ancient scrolls? is featured on Big Think.

In the world of ancient pyramids, it seems like there’s always a race to the past. Are the oldest ones in Egypt? Peru? It’s been up for debate since about 2001. But now, there’s a new contender in the historic who’s-who of pyramids: Indonesia.

A team of archaeologists, geologists, and geophysicists recently published a new paper in Archaeological Prospection in October 2023, suggesting that Gunung Padang in the Cianjur District of the West Java Province is not actually the naturally occurring hill that everyone thought it was. Instead, they say it’s actually an ancient man-made structure. Previously, Gunung Padang referred only to the megalithic stone complex that sat on top of the hill, which some archaeologists believe was used as a celestial calendar (though the actual use is still unknown). But the team’s research shows that the entire structure—complex and hill itself—was sculpted by humans beginning around 8,000 or even 25,000 years ago.

Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, Ph.D, an earthquake geologist and one of the co-authors of the paper, says he “stumbled upon a small hill with a peculiar shape and a surprisingly well-preserved surface” in 2011, while examining the area’s topography.

“This hill stood in stark contrast to the rugged, highly eroded mountainous terrains typical of the Tertiary volcanic regions in its vicinity,” he says.

That discovery sparked several years of research by Hilman Natawidjaja, who gathered multidisciplinary researchers to use ground-penetrating radar and 2D electrical resistivity tomography to explore the site. By 2014, the team knew they had a massive discovery on their hands.

From the inside out, Gunung Padang is constructed in four parts. The first and oldest is in the middle, a natural lava hill from a dead volcano, sculpted by humans into a pyramidal shape. The next portion is made of coarse sands and pillar-like structures, followed by another layer of columnar rocks, and finally the megalithic stones on the surface layer, all meticulously placed and layered by hand.

The published paper was the first full discussion of their findings, and it included details surrounding the exact procedure they used to date the sections of the pyramid they discovered.

“We must not overlook the equally compelling and profound journey to understanding our own history.”

“We are optimistic that our findings will inspire further geo-archaeological studies, as we know many other large, ancient structural treasures in Indonesia and worldwide that remain unexplored and undated by geochronological methods,” Hilman Natawidjaja says. “Surprisingly, even Indonesia’s most renowned ancient sites, including the iconic Borobudur temple, lack precise dating.”

He hopes as well that the new methods of exploration—the radar and tomography, as well as a multidisciplinary approach with multiple scientists—could be helpful in accurately dating other ancient structures, like the moai on Easter Island and the Nan Madol complex in Micronesia.

“Despite the human quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe and search for extraterrestrial life, we must not overlook the equally compelling and profound journey to understanding our own history,” Hilman Natawidjaja says. “Much remains unknown and unexplored, waiting for us to uncover its secrets.”

Megalith site in Gunung Padang. (Wikimedia Commons)

That all being said, the paper is still causing some controversy in the scientific community, some of whom are calling for more research than what’s already been done in order to fully verify the claims.

“The dates are somewhat controversial but seem to be solid,” says Dan Joyce, Director Emeritus and Archaeologist at the Kenosha Museum Campus in Wisconsin. “To better understand… the age of the site, independent investigations concentrating on radiocarbon dates and repetition of results is needed. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary, replicable evidence.”

For his part, Hilman Natawidjaja welcomes the controversy.

“We fully anticipate our study’s results will be met with scepticisms and questions from scientists and scholars worldwide,” he says. “Nevertheless, we welcome the opportunity to engage in discussions and further studies… Our quest for knowledge should lead to enlightenment and unity, not division.”

This article World’s oldest pyramid found not in Egypt or Americas, but in Indonesia is featured on Big Think.

Decades ago, a single energy disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable to humans and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. A casual student of history might assume these shocking statistics refer to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but that would be incorrect. No, this catastrophic specter was the fault of the Banqiao Dam collapse in Henan, China. By comparison, Chernobyl killed fifteen times fewer people and desolated an area of land one-sixth as large.

The Banqiao catastrophe

Though sharply different in magnitude, the Banqiao and Chernobyl disasters occurred under similar circumstances. Constructed by the Chinese Communist party during the Great Leap Forward, with guidance from the Soviet Union, the dam was poorly designed and hastily constructed — just like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Moreover, party officials wanted it to retain as much water as possible because it would be “more revolutionary.” Hydrologist Chen Xing, Chief Engineer of dam projects, warned against that superficial goal and advocated for additional safety features. He was overruled and later reassigned.

Chen Xing’s warnings proved prescient in early August 1975 when Typhoon Nina battered Banqiao and dumped a meter of water in three days. The dam didn’t stand a chance. As it began to disintegrate under heavy strain, one of the workers struggling to save the dam reportedly shouted “Chu Jiaozi!” The river dragon has come…

Six hundred million cubic meters of water would eventually pour through the remains of the ruptured dam, forming a wall of water 6 meters high and 12 kilometers wide moving up to 50 kilometers per hour. The towering deluge eventually collapsed 62 more dams, flooded 30 cities, and destroyed 6.8 million houses. Thousands of people drowned. Far more would eventually die of starvation and disease. The Chinese Communist Party silenced all public accounts of the calamity for more than ten years.

Afraid of nuclear, but not dams

With the full, deadly scope of the Banqiao dam failure now known, there has been no worldwide movement to halt the construction of hydropower dams to save lives. And that makes sense. Sure, hydropower isn’t perfect — it redirects rivers, disrupts wildlife, and is costly to build — but it’s still a clean, generally safe source of electricity. What doomed hundreds of thousands of people almost a half-century ago was not the act of harvesting renewable energy from moving water; it was incompetence stemming from the communist government.

Unfortunately, this key nuance has not been widely realized when it comes to nuclear power. In the 1980s, 46 nuclear power plants came online in the U.S. After Chernobyl, only four have even started being constructed, and none of these have been completed. Despite producing emission-free energy, “nuclear” has become a dirty word.

Evidence firmly dispels this unfounded belief. Various studies have reached the same conclusion: Nuclear power is one of the safest — and perhaps the safest — source of electricity on planet Earth. We shouldn’t let the minute threat of disaster scare us away from a safe, clean, and dependable source of energy, one that could easily power humanity and prevent carbon pollution for centuries to come.

This article The renewable energy disaster that was far deadlier than Chernobyl is featured on Big Think.

Two men walk down a dark stone corridor, their woolen shoes making barely a sound. They are dressed as monks, with shadowy cowls hiding their faces and baggy robes concealing their secrets. But these are not monks. These are acolytes of the Nizari, veteran assassins sent by The Old Man of the Mountains. Tonight, they have a job to do: kill a man.

Conrad of Monferrat staggers out of a room up ahead. He’s drunk, but he has a presence nonetheless. He moves like a warrior, with the weight earned from many battles. The two men reach into their robes. They each pull out identically engraved daggers. They charge Conrad from two sides, but you don’t become a Christian King of Jerusalem by dance and wit. He pulls one close and headbutts his nose. The other stabs Conrad in the lower back. He screams and pulls his own knife out. He lashes out and slices the dazed, broken-nosed assassin in the chest. An airless gurgle, and he’s dead. But his partner does not wait. He dashes in. This time, his blow is better. It’s lethal. Conrad falls to the ground, skewered by a dagger engraved with Syrian calligraphy. The Old Man of the Mountain has kept his word.

The first assassins

The word “assassin” comes from the Arabic word hashīshīn, which was an Islamic sect active between the 11th and 13th centuries. The label hashīshīn was almost certainly a defamatory slur given to them by their enemies. It was said that members of the hashīshīn sect would get high on opium and hashish before an assassination. Worse still, it was commonly supposed that the hashīshīn lived their lives in reclusive, sybaritic orgies of excess. In Islam, intoxicants are forbidden by the Quran. So, calling someone hashīshīn — a junkie or a waster, basically — is a deliberate insult.

The hashīshīn was actually a sect within a sect within a sect. They were the Nizari wing of the Ismaili sect of the Shi’a denomination of Islam. Essentially, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic world was divided into Sunni and Shi’a — both Muslim and both at each other’s throats. At the time of the Nizari Ismaili order, the battlelines were between the Fatimid Caliphate (Shi’a) and the Seljuk Turks (Sunni). The Nizari Ismaili (Shi’a) were caught in the middle of both; they were at war with and hated the Seljuks, but they were also vying for independence from the Fatimid Caliphate. It’s no easy thing to wage a two-front war against two massive nation-states when you are little more than a sectarian offshoot.

So, without big armies or swathes of territories to call upon, the Nizari Ismaili used the only thing left to them: subterfuge, sabotage, and assassination.

Sensationalism and propaganda

When you’re in the business of political killings, you make a lot of enemies. And your enemy’s historians will not remember you well. A lot of what we know about the Nizari is ridiculous slander mixed with Christian orientalism. The wildest story we owe to Marco Polo.

It’s about the assassins’ bacchanal initiation ceremonies. Although it might be legend rather than fact, it was said that the leader of the Nizari, Hasan-i Sabbah, would get new recruits absolutely off their rocker with hashish, opium, and unknown exotic drugs. They’d smoke themselves into oblivion. Then, high as a kite, Hasan would parade beautiful damsels in front of the new recruit. He’d reveal fountains of milk and honey. The initiate would be gifted an orgiastic paradise of women, wine, and music, all of which was carefully choreographed to resemble Muhammed’s depiction of paradise. When the initiates came to and sobered up, Hasan would say, “If you follow me, you will receive that.” It was like a free sample of heaven, and now you needed to sign up.

In reality, it’s highly unlikely the Nizari used drugs often, if at all. In fact, sects like the Nizari Ismaili often gain popularity and win over converts precisely because of their austere, puritanical “true religion” rather than any licentiousness. Polo was just regurgitating the same hearsay everyone else had heard.

The truth of the dagger

So what truth is there to the stories of the Nizari? We do know that they were prolific in their murder, and they were good at it. Despite what Christian chronicles might have thought, they did not exclusively, or even overwhelmingly, target crusader lords like Conrad de Montferrat. In modern terms, it makes much more sense to see them as guerilla fighters or terrorists who were targeting the Seljuk Turks. In fact, they even allied with the Christians when it served their political ends.

The Nizari operated in two ways. The first was that they infiltrated court life and diplomatic missions to try and manipulate, cajole, and steer the leaders of the Seljuk empire. For example, in the 1090s, the Nizari successfully managed to have one of their own, Qiwam, appointed as the vizier to Prince Mahmud of the Seljuk Empire. Qiwam whispered in the prince’s ear, and as a result, a Seljuk army was persuaded against marching on one of the assassins’ mountain strongholds.

The second way the Nizari operated was, unsurprisingly, by assassination. It’s hard to know how many people the Nizari killed: We don’t have their records and there was so much fear and paranoia around the cult of assassins that pretty much any murder was ascribed to them. But, as a rule, the Nizari used daggers and targeted high-profile enemies, usually in public. As with Conrad of Monferrat, they would disguise themselves as monks, beggars, servants, or soldiers and would kill anyone who wished the Nizari Ismaili ill.

Don’t mess with the Mongols

The Nizari thrived or languished depending on the talents of their leaders. The first leader, Hasan, was a shrewd and charismatic leader who knew when to send a dagger and when to send silver words. Eighty years after Hasan’s death, Rashid al-Din Sinan likewise led the Nizari well. But their decline was inevitable.

Even at the height of their power in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Nizari only ever held a scattering of easily defendable, but strategically unimportant, mountain fortresses. They could never field an army. Their power depended on the panic they spread and the skill of their assassins. Saladin, the famous Muslim general who reclaimed Jerusalem, almost seized the Nizari stronghold at Alamut but inexplicably lifted the siege after a week — the reasons for which are still a mystery to historians. After this, the Nizari were considered little more than gadflies or stories to scare children.

One people you did not want to annoy, though, was the Mongols. When their 13th-century equine blitzkrieg stormed across Eurasia, they weren’t going to stop for some “Old Man in the Mountains.” When the Nizari threatened the Mongols, the Mongols brought swift and brutal destruction down on them. In 1256, they took Alamut. Within four years, every Nizari fortress was lost. You don’t bring a knife to a Khan fight.

This article The story behind the real-life Assassin’s Creed is featured on Big Think.

After the people of ancient Rome expelled the despotic Tarquinius Superbus in 509 BC, they vowed never again to serve another king. Reassembling the remnants of their kingdom into a republic, Tarquinius’ traumatized subjects adopted a constitution whose checks and balances would prevent power from concentrating in the hands of any individual.

Instead of one king, the Roman Republic was ruled by two consuls. These consuls were nominated by the Senate and chosen by the Comitia Centuriata, a popular assembly. Each consul could veto the other’s decisions. Both were dependent on the Senate to implement their executive orders. The largely patrician (ruling class) Senate, meanwhile, had to contend with the tribunes of the plebs (citizens acting in an official governing capacity).  

The only weakness in this setup was revealed during national emergencies, which called for quick, decisive action as opposed to unending debate. To help the Republic defend itself in times of crisis, its founders created guidelines for appointing temporary dictators who, while in charge, stood head and shoulders above the senators, consuls, and even Rome’s old kings.

One could even argue that Rome’s dictators were more powerful than its emperors. Constitutionally, the emperor and the Senate were considered equals, with the latter absorbing the duties and responsibilities of the people’s tribunes. Unlike dictators, emperors also lived at the mercy of soldiers, with Commodus, Caracalla, and Elagabalus dying at the hands of their own bodyguards: the Praetorian Guard. After Constantine, Rome’s emperors were further constrained by the principles of Christianity.

Unlimited power for a limited time

True to his name, the dictator was the most powerful person in the Roman Republic. His decisions could not be vetoed or appealed by the other branches of government, leaving him free to conscript soldiers, plan military campaigns, or persecute enemies of the state. Crucially, dictators could not be held accountable for their actions after their six-month term expired.

Between 501 BC and 202 BC, Rome saw approximately 85 dictatorships. Dictators were the only magistrates in Rome who were appointed rather than elected. Candidates were typically picked by consuls in collaboration with the Senate, though there also have been cases in which dictators were appointed by the Comitia Centuriata instead.

There were many reasons for appointing a dictator. Some, like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (the namesake of the American city Cincinnati) and Marcus Furius Camillus, were appointed when the Republic was at war with foreign powers. Others, including Quintus Hortensius, entered office to control domestic conflicts between the patricians and plebeians.

Dictators were also appointed to fill in for the consuls. In 257 BC, Quintus Ogulnius Gallus became dictator to lead a religious festival in honor of Jupiter while the incumbent consuls were fighting in the First Punic War. During the Second Punic War, which lasted 17 years, the Roman Republic repeatedly appointed dictators to oversee elections.

The dictatorship and faith

Rome’s greatest dictators are less remembered for their accomplishments than their admirable displays of self-restraint and obedience to the law. Throughout his life, Lucius Camillus was named dictator five times. Time and again he respected the term limit, returned his borrowed authority to the consuls and the Senate, and retired to his countryside estate as an ordinary citizen.

Camillus’ actions were informed by experience. He had, after all, personally witnessed the tyranny of Tarquinius. The same cannot be said for his eventual successor Cincinnatus, who holds a special place in Roman memory for honoring the code of the Republic despite being born sometime after its establishment and having no personal recollection of the last king’s deposition.

“How is it possible,” asks the historian Marc de Wilde, “that, until the first century BC, the Roman dictatorship was never abused and turned against itself?” Previous scholars have pointed to formal constraints such as the six-month term limit, but this argument is not convincing, considering that dictators could — and often did — make changes to the Republic’s constitution.  

In her book States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies, Nomi Claire Lazar makes the simple yet bold claim that the office of dictator was successful because dictators always acted in good faith. Such behavior, De Wilde elaborates, was ensured by informal restraints like peer pressure as well as moral and religious responsibility.

Roman dictatorship disintegrates

Although dictators repeatedly saved the Roman Republic from destruction, the office had its critics. Fearing the patrician Senate might someday use a dictator to oppress civil liberties, the Comitia Centuriata campaigned for the right to appeal a candidate’s nomination. This made the appointment process more democratic, but also slower and less effective.  

While Camillus and Cincinnatus enjoyed near-limitless power, future dictators faced an increasing number of constraints. In the late Republic, they had to depend on the Senate for financial support. They were also barred from exercising their power outside Italy, a major setback for the office as Rome extended its influence across the Mediterranean.

For these and other reasons, the office slowly fell into disuse until, more than 100 years after the last dictatorship, it was revived by the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla had emerged as the victor of a ten-year-long civil war. As conventional dictator, he used his power to crush opposition as well as reinforce the constitution to prevent future infighting.

Though he had appointed himself and served for three years instead of six months, Sulla resembled previous dictators insofar as he stepped down once his original task — in his own words, “to write the laws and to restore a constitution to the state” — had been completed. Leaving the Republic in the hands of duly elected officials, he too retired to live in the countryside.

From dictator to emperor

If acting in good faith is considered the primary characteristic of Roman dictatorship, Sulla cannot be considered a dictator. Sulla’s rule, as Theodor Mommsen writes in Roman Constitutional Law, “has nothing in common with the older [dictatorships] apart from the name and several outward appearances.”

Sulla — and, by extension, the dictatorship itself — are responsible for ending Roman republicanism and paving the way for the Roman Empire insofar as they set a political precedent for Gaius Julius Caesar, who in 44 BC proclaimed himself dictator perpetuo or “dictator in perpetuity.” He held this title until he was assassinated by the Senate a month later.

Ignoring Caesar and Sulla, though, the fact remains that most dictators remained loyal to the constitution that granted them their power. Thanks to them, the Roman dictatorship is now regarded as a remarkably successful form of emergency government.

This article In ancient Rome, only one person was more powerful than the emperor is featured on Big Think.

A continent the width of the U.S. has been missing for 155 million years. Scientists have long puzzled whether this chunk of northwest Australia has been either floating somewhere unseen, resting on the ocean floor, or slowly fusing to the underbelly of a larger landmass. Modern mapping largely ruled out the first two theories, but let’s say a 3,000-mile slab of terra firma did get lodged beneath another continent. Experts believe they would have at least been able to find some trace of it. Really, how could something so large just completely vanish?

Furthermore, if we can just lose a massive piece of land like that, that could mean scientists have been completely wrong about Pangea and our understanding of the Earth’s geological history in general.

Finally, after seven years of searching, Dutch researchers at Utrecht University have definitively located pieces of the landmass within the vast jungles of Southeast Asia.

Look at a map of the world: If you “close all the oceans we know have formed in the last 200 million years, then basically the continents fit together in a C-shaped configuration,” said Dr. Eldert L. Advokaat, Argoland researcher and lead author of the study. That’s Pangea. “The interesting part is what happens in that C shape,” he said, “in the Tethys Ocean.”

This prehistoric body of water is where Argoland disappeared during the Late Jurassic period, leaving a bite out of Australia that we now call the Argo Abyssal Plain. Geologists were pretty sure the land didn’t sink, as the “hidden” continent of Zealandia did after breaking away from Australia 80 million years ago. Rather, they worried Argoland was lost by subduction, a phenomenon in which the edge of one tectonic plate slides beneath another and gets recycled into the Earth’s mantle.

If one U.S.-sized continent could disappear, how many others have done the same?

Typically, experts can trace continental subduction by offscraping, where part of the upper crust gets scraped and builds up, resulting in mountains. Such is the case with the Indian subcontinent colliding with Asia, forming the Himalayas. In the case of Greater Adria, another previously lost continent that tore away from North Africa 240 million years ago, the lower crust subducted, but offscraped remnants of the upper crust were later found all over the Mediterranean.

Further complicating the search, pieces thought to be from Argoland kept cropping up all over Myanmar and Indonesia, but samples showed they predated the continent’s split from Australia by tens of millions of years. If Argoland subducted without a trace, then the fragments found in Southeast Asia could have been from another landmass we didn’t even know was missing. If one U.S.-sized continent could disappear, how many others have done the same? Advokaat said we would “basically have no clue what happened in the Tethys Ocean.”

But thanks to his near-decade of research, along with his colleague Dr. Douwe J.J. van Hinsbergen’s, we do know what happened to Argoland: It broke into an archipelago—an Argopelago, rather—before pulling away from Australia. Its seaside slowly thinned into ribbons of continents (i.e., microcontinents), forming smaller ocean basins made of thinner-yet-denser oceanic crust. Then, they tore away and drifted for a bit before embedding themselves in various Southeast Asian jungles, where they are today. An animation published with the study shows the journey over many megayears.

Hinsbergen said he’ll start digging for more lost continents next.

The finding aligns with our present-day picture of Pangea. “We get more understanding of how the Earth works,” said Dr. Nick Mortimer, who led the research project uncovering Zealandia. “On the one hand, how and why continents break up into large and small pieces (Argoland leaving Australia). And on the other hand, how continents grow (Argoland pieces arriving in Eurasia).” This glimpse into prehistory unlocks paths of discovery for biodiversity and climate.

Of the oceans that formed since the breakup of Pangea, the Indian and Atlantic, co-author Dr. Douwe van Hinsbergen said Argoland was the last missing piece of the puzzle. But the older Pacific Ocean could absolutely harbor some missing territories, possibly tucked away somewhere in the mountain belts of Alaska and British Columbia, where van Hinsbergen said he’ll start digging for more lost continents next.

This article How an entire continent went missing is featured on Big Think.

In Stalin’s Russia, roughly 1.5 million people were in gulags in any given year. Around 15% of the entire population between 1930 and 1950 passed through a gulag. Two million never came out. A gulag was a forced labor camp, a kind of open-air prison. At first, they were near or even in major urban hubs. But, when it became apparent that this was bad for morale and their international relations, these gulags were shuffled off to remote parts of the USSR. Siberia is the best known.

For some, gulags were better than the tiny, windowless cells they had endured for months. For most, however, faraway prisons meant less oversight from Moscow edicts. Camp commandants housed hundreds of miles from the Politburo were given the liberty to do as they wish. And, as is often the case, unrestrained power revealed the worst in human nature. People were left to die in the cold. A common punishment was to have inmates walk 2 km to the baths, in below-zero temperatures, absolutely naked. Prisoners were deliberately given rotten meat, when illness meant death. Workers had to dig trenches in freezing ground with only their hands. Women were raped. Children were malnourished. Men were beaten for fun.

Even in the absence of such brutality, exile has always been a cruel form of punishment. Let’s dig into why.

The harsh reality of exile

Humans have a long history of banishing their criminals. Rome and Greece would send their dissidents to faraway colonies. (The word “ostracize” comes from the Greek tradition of voting for someone to be banished from the city.) The Jews of the Old Testament spent 70 years exiled in Babylon. The British sent their convicts to Australia, and the French sent theirs to Guyana. As a form of punishment, exile predates historical records. Heck, Even Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden. Only in the last century have we decided not to banish prisoners.

So why is exile such a feared and cruel punishment? Exile didn’t just mean moving to some faraway town. It meant never seeing or hearing from your family again. You might get letters sporadically or even the occasional visit, but you would miss everything that mattered. You would not be there at your mother’s death. You would miss your daughter’s marriage or your son’s first job. Your wife would move in with someone else. Nor was exile usually to some holiday idyll. For instance, Ovid was exiled to a sweltering, disease-ridden port on the Black Sea. 

Your life support machine

Before the introduction of the modern welfare state, your neighborhood was your support network. Your local community was not some trivial, replaceable bauble. When you were ill, old, or unemployed, you needed the hospitality and charity of your neighbors if you were to live another winter. There were no formal charity structures, so the needy or hard-up were the responsibility of everyone.

Since exiles were almost always criminals (by the law of the land, anyway), they often were branded with some representation of their crime. When the exiles returned, as the majority of them eventually did, they were then shunned by society. They couldn’t get a job, a room in an inn, or any local charity. In Tsarist Russia, for instance, thieves would have B (for вор, or “thief”) or Б (for бунтовщик, or “rioter”) burned into their cheeks or foreheads. From the middle of the 18th century, all Russian criminals and exiles were branded this way. When branding was abolished under the gulags, Russian gangs and criminals tattooed themselves with their crimes — a kind of homage to the past and taking ownership of their shame.

Life in a gulag

Back in the gulag, we can see why exile in open-air prisons was such a cruel form of punishment. When someone is exiled, they are usually not welcomed into another city or country. They’re sent to a place of exiles, which invariably means criminal gangs run things. Living in exile, you had to be constantly vigilant for brutal, unexpected, and life-changing violence at any moment. Even in Stalinist Russia, people were used to certain rules and the structure of civil society. In exile, the only rule was survival.

Exiles were not only cut off from their friends; they were cut off from human connections. In gulags, people learned to fear each other and punch down all the time. Gulags were a Hobbesian nightmare — a cold and cruel place of theft, assault, and isolation. It’s been plausibly argued that the Russian gulags served as schools and training grounds for the mafias that dominated Russian society from the 1980s onward.

The nourishment scale

Commandants often ran gulags on a system known as the “nourishment scale.” This was a rule popularized by Naftaly Frenkel, in which prisoners were allocated food in proportion to their work; if you worked harder, you got better fed. The result was that, over time, the smaller, slower, and less efficient workers were starved to death. It was a vicious, inhumane cycle: If you got weaker, you got less food, and you got even weaker still.

Before you were exiled, you would be valued as a human being. In the gulags, you were valued only by how hard you could work. That would mean working 12-hour days of hard manual labor, often without the correct equipment. It might involve panning for gold in freezing water, moving splintered tree trunks without gloves, or digging trenches with your hands. This was a world where people would deliberately self-mutilate because the doctors’ wards were better than life outside.

The true brutality of gulags — and exile more broadly — is that it turns you into a non-desirable and untouchable. You are reduced to your crime, and every vestige of your old life is taken from you. Exile is a kind of death of who you once were.

This article From ancient Greece to Stalin’s Russia: The unique cruelty of exile is featured on Big Think.

Ever heard of the phrase, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times?” Chances are you have. This catchy warning about the cyclical nature of history can be found in the most unlikely of places: internet memes, inspirational posters, and even embroidered onto sets of Etsy cushions.

Although generally attributed to author G. Michael Hopf’s post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Remain, the underlying idea probably originated with a 1991 book called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. Written by William Strauss, a playwright, and Neil Howe, a historian and senior associate for the Global Aging Initiative’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, Generations argues the development of human civilization is heavily affected by and even mirrors the transition between different generations of human beings. According to the so-called Strauss-Howe hypothesis, as their train of thought is now known, history can be roughly divided into periods of 80 to 100 years. In each period, four generations compete for power, resulting in a crisis moment followed by radical social and political reconstruction. In the case of the U.S., such crisis points include the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Second World War.

Aside from having at least some precedent in the field of sociology, the Strauss-Howe hypothesis or simply generational theory also appeals to common sense. Each generation is shaped by unique events and challenges, so it follows that their values would influence the events of their day. At the same time, the theory has drawn its fair share of criticism, with many claiming it’s more science fiction than science.

Weight of ancestors

Although the topic has only attracted attention from scholars in recent decades, people have been talking about the importance of generations since the days of ancient Greece. When, in Homer’s Iliad, the Greek warrior Diomedes asks his Trojan foe Glaucus who he is, the latter doesn’t mention his age, sex, profession, or place of origin — instead, he gives a comprehensive overview of his entire family tree.

“Greathearted son of Tydeus,” he tells the Greek:

“Why do you question my lineage / As is the generation of leaves, so too of men: At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground, but then the flourishing woods / Gives birth, and the season of spring comes into existence; So it is of the generations of men, which alternately come forth and pass away.”

Compared to the Christian Europe of medieval times, which emphasized the individual’s responsibility to live a morally upright life and enter heaven, the Homeric Greeks saw themselves first and foremost as the product of their forefathers, the fruits of their ancestry evident in their very person.

Even if they don’t accept every tenant of the Strauss-Howe hypothesis, many sociologists accept generation as one of the key factors explaining sociocultural change. In doing so, they follow the example of Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian scholar who argued generations are defined not by birthdays, but shared experiences that influence one’s values. Mannheim also argued that, for a generation to manifest, its members needed to actively acknowledge the experiences that influenced them — through books, news reporting, and other means of cultural production. It’s the same with self-fulfilling prophecies, really; only when a group recognizes itself as a group does it begin to act as one.

Of course, it’s one thing to say generations are shaped by history, and another to say they shape history in turn. And while academics are happy to admit that first bit, they continue to have strong doubts about the second.

Problems with the Strauss-Howe hypothesis

To some, generational theory is no more than pseudo-historicism blown out of proportion by the media, no more reliable than, say, the Phantom Time hypothesis, which makes the outrageous claim that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III added three centuries to the Gregorian calendar to make his own reign coincide with the year 1000 AD. (That’s another story, though.)

One of the biggest problems with the Strauss-Howe hypothesis is that generations are a subjective measurement, one that requires researchers to make gross generalizations about the individuals they study. It also operates on the questionable assumption, as the Forbes journalist Jessica Kriegel puts it, “that cultural events determine personality more than life experience and circumstance,” a claim many sociologists readily debate.

Strauss and Howe’s notably unacademic backgrounds should also ring some alarm bells. Bestselling writers first and scholars second, the duo has arguably masked their lack of expertise behind language compelling and marketable enough to turn Generations into a kind of media empire: the ninth book in the series, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End, was released last year.

There are other problems. Generational theory holds that people’s worldview and behavior — decided by the era in which they were born — remain static throughout their lives. This is, of course, not the case, with numerous studies showing that things like religion, political beliefs, sexual preference, and even personality can change over a person’s lifetime. 

Furthermore, Strauss and Howe’s aspiration to apply their hypothesis on a global scale ignores the undeniable fact that generations — if there even is such a thing as a generation — form at different times in different countries and cultures, making it impossible to summarize world history by lining up randomly selected grandsons, sons, fathers, and grandfathers.

The Fourth Turning

The terms of the Strauss-Howe hypothesis are vague enough to the point that anyone can cherrypick evidence and create a persuasive narrative around them. That said, Strauss and Howe’s is pretty persuasive. Their assessment of the four generations that make up American society (Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and the Baby Boomers), for instance, goes as follows:

The Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, grew up in a time of nearly uninterrupted economic growth, making them both optimistic and idealistic. Gen X (1965-1980), raised during the hardships of the oil crisis, turned against the capitalist-consumerist culture their parents embraced, forming countercultures. Gen Y (that is, Millennials, 1982-1994) was born during another period of financial security, one that coincided with the advent of the digital world. The comfortable, sheltered environment in which they grew up, Howe says in The Fourth Turning — an environment of Apple computers, Power Rangers cartoons, and a collapsing Soviet hegemony — made them self-assured, attention-seeking, and perfectionistic, qualities that, in the far less secure world we call home today, manifest as stress, burnout, and generalized anxiety disorder. According to Howe, Millennials will soon upend the conservative order put in place by the Baby Boomers, transforming the country in much the same way as the Revolutionary War or Civil War have done before.

Time will tell if Strauss and Howe are right.

This article Strauss-Howe generational theory: Is revolution coming to America? is featured on Big Think.

In an abbey in a small Italian town, a fresco shows a haggard Christ shoving the end of his cross into a woman’s chest. Perhaps half the cross has been mysteriously absorbed into her body; she calmly gazes upward, guiding it inward with gentle hands. This is Saint Clare (Santa Chiara) of Montefalco, abbess in the late thirteenth century. The painting depicts a vision she had, one she recounted so often that, upon her death, her fellow nuns decided to actually cut open her heart in search of the cross of which she had spoken so frequently.

This dissection represents an early entry in what would become a tradition of performing autopsies to consider an individual’s sanctity, according to historian Simon Ditchfield. The stones formed inside organs, revealed after death, served as “potential markers of sanctity in early modern Italy,” explains historian Jetze Touber.

Inside Clare, examiners found not only a tiny crucifix, but an array of the instruments of the passion: “a shroud, a crown of thorns, three nails, a lance, a sponge, a whip and a column,” all formed out of the flesh of her heart. On top of that, three stones were discovered in her gallbladder. According to Isidoro Mosonio, then Vicar General of Bologna, the stones were

colored like ashes, equal in appearance, color, and weight, and laid out in the gallbladder in such a way that a triangular form resulted, by which the secrets of the Very Holy Trinity were represented.

At least, that’s the story told at Clare’s canonization trial, a few years after her death. The case was controversial, notes historian of religion and science Bradford Bouley. The nuns were suspected of planting the relics, and it was rumored that in life, Clare had consorted with heretics.  Although the nuns were ultimately judged innocent of subterfuge, Clare would not be officially declared a saint until centuries later.

Saint Clare was not the only holy woman whose innards were ransacked for hidden symbols of saintliness. Saint Margarita of Città di Castello similarly was discovered to have three stones in her heart, each ornamented with scenes, “representing the birth of Christ, the Virgin Mary, Joseph and a white dove.”

As historian of science Katharine Park writes, even before the examination of Clare, it was thought that

the saint’s body differed from that of other people, in the way that the victim of plague or poisoning was recognizable by certain unmistakable signs. These differences were not confined to incorruptibility and the odor of sanctity but also included external and internal marks, such as stigmata and the alien structures found in Chiara’s and Margarita’s hearts.

Conversely, a criminal’s body might contain indications of a malevolent nature—like a hairy heart or a mysterious extra rib. In sin, as in sanctity, the physical and spiritual were deeply intertwined.

Similarly, there was a mysterious correspondence between the presence of the divine and the presence of the demonic. The signs of possession were strangely similar to the signs of holiness: possessed people and holy people both were known to go into trances, to levitate, to have a mysterious grasp of foreign languages, to utter strange prophecies, and to survive long periods without eating. As Nancy Caciola and Moshe Sluhovsky describe, treatises on witchcraft warned of “a demonic hierarchy of ‘anti-saints’ modeled on the divine” and characterized by “anti-miracles.” The holy spirit, like evil spirits, could inhabit the body; but while the divine would make itself known inside the heart, demons were obliged to lurk in the digestive system. And women, believed to be more physically porous than men, were held to be correspondingly more liable to be possessed.

At the same time, the culture of piety among female mystics was shockingly, even graphically visceral, notes historian Susan Juster. Blood poured from the mouths and nostrils of religious women, and their bodies contorted as they were carried away by mystical visions. Frenzies of ecstasy and torments of suffering mingled together, merging into a single holy fervor.

Church authorities tended towards suspicion: was a given holy woman a vessel of the divine, as she claimed to be, or were her seeming visions simply a reflection of some kind of pathology—a demon, a disease? As Caciola and Sluhovsky argue, this attitude was a common—and growing one—in the Middle Ages. Though it was a time marked with “the rise of the female saint,” that rise

was neither linear nor uncontested. Indeed, at the same moment that more and more women began to gain attention for their claims to celestial visions, suspicions concerning women’s reliability when describing their supernatural experiences grew.

At the same time, write Caciola and Sluhovsky, “there also was a sharp increase in reports of women being defined as demoniacs—that is, as possessed by demons.” In the historical record, they note, the difference between a report of a twisted demoniac and a hagiography of a blessed saint could be simply a matter of who’s telling the story.

Perhaps the future St. Clare’s sisters were aware of the fine line walked by their abbess, and that’s why they felt so strongly about proving that she had consorted with the holy spirit. Their convictions were firm enough that they were willing to slice her heart open and take a look inside.

This article The 13th-century nun whose heart was dissected in search of a crucifix is featured on Big Think.

One of the most iconic moments in movie history is when Russell Crowe, dressed in leather and brandishing a bloodied gladius, turns to an awe-struck and silent coliseum to shout, “Are you not entertained?” Yes, Russell, we are. Very much so. Whether it be big-screen Hollywood blockbusters, TV historical dramas, or Las Vegas live shows, people love the idea of ancient gladiatorial fights.

What’s there not to love? There’s blood, sweat, and tears. There’s swinging, punching, kicking, and slashing action, punctuated by shocking gore and the promise of imminent death. In the bloodthirsty chants of a frenzied crowd, we see our shadow selves. We may tut at the Rome Colosseum, yet we cannot turn our heads away from the violence.

One problem, though, is that we get so much of it wrong. The history we see is very different from the history as it was. To help sort Roman history from Roman myth, Big Think spoke with Alexander Mariotti. Mariotti has been a consultant on big shows like HBO’s Rome, Starz’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Paramount Pictures’ Hercules. He is currently consulting on the new Gladiator movie (2024) and Colosseum on the History Channel. Here, we unpack three myths popular culture gets wrong.

Myth #1: Fights to the death

Maximus Decimus Meridius is on a rampaging killing spree. Spartacus has just decapitated his third opponent. The emperor gives a somber thumbs down. In all cases, the message is the same: Gladiators die. One of the more common myths we have about gladiators is that it was a death match. Two would enter, and only one would leave.

According to Mariotti, though, this is all wrong. Gladiator fights were only rarely, or accidentally, to the death. There are two reasons for this. First, gladiatorial combat was first and foremost about demonstrating “what the Romans called virtus, which was physical and mental endurance, as well as martial skill.” The truth to Russell Crowe’s Gladiator is the eerie silence after he massacres his opponents. People were there to watch a sport; they wanted to see training, talent, and athleticism. Killing someone in the first minute offers none of that.

Second, gladiators were expensive. Gladiators would each receive months of training from a doctores. They would get the best medical care from the finest physicians of the day. The Roman physician Galen, who went on to define European medicine for 1500 years, learned his craft as a doctor to gladiators. Given the huge cost of training and keeping a good and popular gladiator, it makes sense that people would be reluctant for them to die. In fact, gladiators were often covered by huge insurance policies. As Mariotti tells Big Think, “You would have to pay anything between $400 and $430,000 to make up for the damages… because if my guy comes to your party or your event and he hurts himself, I’ve lost earnings, and I have a contract with him.”

Mariotti emphasized that boxing, involving fights to unconsciousness, and wrestling, with its choking holds, would have killed far more people than weapon fights.

Myth #2: All fights were the same

Gladiatorial combat was a sport. It was about proving who had the most virtus. And so it was much more complex and varied than we might suppose. Mariotti says we would do well to compare it with modern MMA. This wasn’t just about who was the best fighter; it was also about the best fighting style.

Mariotti tells us that there were between 20 and 30 different styles of gladiatorial combat. However, like MMA, while there may be dozens of fighting styles, most gladiators tended to gravitate toward a handful. The style you adopted usually depended on your body type, athleticism, and what your doctores chose for you. “One of the most famous is the retiarius,” Mariotti tells Big Think. “He’s famous because he’s quite unique in that he’s probably the least armored discipline in gladiator combat.” The retiarius usually only had shoulder armor and light arm coverings. At the other end of the spectrum, you had the murmillo, who would wear heavy, segmented armor and leg coverings and carry a shield.

A retiarius “would have to be quick. He’s more about speed,” while a murmillo would bide their time and work “systematically and tactically.” It would have been David versus Goliath. One difference between MMA and ancient gladiatorial fights was that there were no weight categories. In fact, the opposite was the case. Today, a heavyweight (murmillo) would never fight a featherweight (retiarius). But the Romans wanted to know what style of fighting was best as well as body type.

Myth #3: There were no rules

The Colosseum really was more like a boxing or MMA ring than a battlefield. Like almost all sports in history, gladiatorial fights had rules. As Mariotti puts it:

“There absolutely were rules. We know that, for example, if a gladiator tripped, he was allowed to stand up because one of the things that we don’t really get told often about gladiators is that they fought in rounds. If you look at modern sports, there’s no single physical combat sport that is not fought in rounds. And the simple answer is that, physically, we are unable to maintain an anaerobic level of intensity for more than a couple of minutes. Now add some armor, add big helmets, and weapons, and your physical exhaustion becomes tenfold. We have a tendency to make people into mythological characters. Of course, Gladiators didn’t fight for hours; they fought in rounds.”

The other big omission Hollywood tends to make concerns referees: Gladiatorial fights usually had two of them. “There was the summa rudis and the secunda rudis, who were basically the two referees — one in the middle and one on the side, exactly like every sport today.” There were fouls, cautions, and appeals.

Blood, sand, and human nature

For Mariotti, the reason why it is important to challenge myths is to recognize that the Roman people were not alien, brutal, bloodthirsty monsters. They did not gather in tens of thousands to watch torture and death. They gathered to watch a sport. “The concept of two men showing physical prowess —showing skill and bravery — is such an ingrained human desire that I think the Colosseum exists today and will always exist. Which is why I’m not surprised that MMA is the fastest growing sport. So maybe the biggest misconception we have is that we’re entirely different from the Romans.”

This article World expert and film consultant debunks 3 gladiator myths is featured on Big Think.

LONDON IS A GHOST HUNTER’S dream, dotted with potentially haunted sites like mass graves of plague victims and the pub where Jack the Ripper’s final victim was last seen alive. But in the early 2000s, one of its most reliably spooky locations was the front room of a ground floor flat in north London. People reported feeling a supernatural presence, dizzying sensations, and even abject terror. The apartment wasn’t the site of anything grisly or nefarious that could explain these experiences, though: It was part of a scientific experiment on external, physical causes of ghostly encounters.

For decades, skeptics have attempted to find scientific explanations for hauntings. Several of their theories have shown promise. In 1921, the American Journal of Ophthalmology detailed two cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in which the victims experienced psychological symptoms, including delusions and hallucinations. “The paper reads like a ghost story in places, and certainly throws light on the question of haunted houses,” reported the British Medical Journal that same year. More recently, the writer Carrie Poppy experienced a haunting that turned out to be a near-fatal carbon monoxide leak.

Gas leaks are far from the only potential culprit in hauntings. In the 1980s, engineer and computer scientist Vic Tandy found himself feeling dread and even seeing shadowy figures in his laboratory. In addition to being a scientist, he was a fencer. One day he brought his fencing foil into the lab and noticed that it was vibrating. He learned that a new ventilation fan had been installed; when the fan was turned off, the vibrations stopped, along with the spooky experiences. In 1998, Tandy published his hypothesis: Under the right circumstances, low-frequency sound waves below the bounds of human hearing, called infrasound, can cause people to feel and see ghostly presences.

In the early 2000s, Chris French, a psychology professor at Goldsmiths University (now retired), and Usman Haque, an artist and architect, had been discussing the possibility that hauntings are caused by infrasound, along with a hypothesis suggesting that some spooky experiences are the result of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, affecting the brain’s electromagnetic activity. French and Haque began to hatch a plan.

“The idea was, wouldn’t it be fun if these ideas are true? If we built an artificial haunted room where we induced these kinds of situations, playing around with infrasound and electromagnetic fields?” says French. “Long story short, we decided to do that.”

For several weeks, French and Haque took over the front room in Haque’s mother’s north London home. “We produced this kind of specially constructed circular chamber,” says French. The empty white room contained hidden devices to produce electromagnetic fields and infrasound. The researchers recruited 79 people to visit the room and see if they experienced anything strange.

Ethically, the researchers couldn’t just set people loose in a spooky place without any warning. To get informed consent, they told their subjects that they might be exposed to unusual patterns of electromagnetic activity, infrasound, both, or neither. As a result, they might have some “anomalous experiences.”

“Sure enough, quite a lot of people did,” says French. “Over a fifth of people reported a sense of presence. A lot of people reported feeling dizzy.” He adds that the long list of participant reactions included about eight percent who reported “terror, which we hadn’t really anticipated.”

The “haunted chamber” seemed to prove that electromagnetic fluctuations and infrasound made people feel frightened. “We were quite excited at first,” says French—then they noticed something spooky about the data. After analyzing the results, the team found it didn’t matter whether the electromagnetic field or infrared was on or off. Instead, people’s anomalous experiences correlated with how suggestible they were, based on their responses to a survey that was part of the experiment.

“The most parsimonious explanation is, if you say to some people, ‘If you go into this space, you might have some weird experiences,’ the more suggestible ones will report that will happen,” says French. According to the study, infrasound and electromagnetic weirdness are less likely to cause ghost sightings than simply telling someone that they might see a ghost. “Which is interesting from a psychological point of view, but it would have been much more exciting to have got results relating to magnetic fields,” says French.

While the “haunted chamber” is a strike against infrasound and electromagnetic fluctuations as the causes of ghost sightings and eerie sensations, potential environmental factors in hauntings continue to draw the interest of researchers.

Shane Rogers, a professor of environmental engineering at Clarkson University, was inspired to study haunted places by his family’s experience with mold. When exposed to allergens, including mold, his children seemed to become irrationally angry or fearful.

Rogers seemed to be onto something. Anecdotal evidence, including a 2019 study on workers in a Finnish hospital with a mold problem, shows there may be a correlation between exposure to the greenish black mold Stachybotrys chartarum and neurological impairment. A 2021 study showed that mold inhalation caused neural, cognitive, and emotional problems in mice.

“I always thought it’d be really interesting to just test in haunted places and see what’s going on with the mold, and see if we can find a link there,” says Rogers.

Rogers and his students turned to ghost hunting TV shows for a list of haunted places to investigate. In the 2010s, they investigated around two dozen sites: a combination of places that were purportedly haunted and not. They sampled the air in each of their research sites to ascertain the size and quantity of particles present in the air. “It doesn’t identify, specifically, mold spores, but at least tells you what might be present that’s inhalable,” says Rogers.

Some scary stories simply defy explanation.

Rogers’s study has not yet undergone peer review, but his initial results are intriguing. “There is definitely a significant difference between mold presence in haunted places versus not-haunted places,” says Rogers. Based on analyzing particulate sizes in the samples, he says, “We have roughly five to six times more mold spores showing up in places that are reported haunted.”

While environmental factors such as toxic mold, infrasound, carbon monoxide poisoning, and electromagnetic fluctuations are tantalizingly concrete explanations for paranormal experiences, French remains skeptical. He suspects such external influences account for a very small number of cases, if any; more likely explanations include sleep paralysis, false memories, and even hallucinations, which French notes “are much more common amongst the non-clinical population than is generally appreciated.”

This explanation, that “hauntings” are quirks of neurology and psychology, is perhaps even more unsettling than the idea that they’re caused by the environment around us. While toxic mold or a carbon monoxide leak are certainly cause for concern, if they’re the culprits behind strange things we experience, we can rest easy in the knowledge that something “real” is happening, that we’re not “crazy.”

But sometimes, environmental causes like those explored in the “haunted chamber” and neuroscience-driven hypotheses both fail to explain supernatural encounters. Some scary stories simply defy explanation, French says. “We’ve got to just be humble enough to admit that we can’t explain every single case.”

This article Are “paranormal” experiences due to infrasound, gas leaks, and toxic mold? is featured on Big Think.

Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. John Aubrey (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals.

Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. (74,000 called themselves Druids in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times.

But there’s a disconnect here. In the popular imagination, Stonehenge and Druidism now go together like tea and crumpets. Historically, Stonehenge, a product of Neolithic Britain, predates Caesar by thousands of years. It had nothing to do with Druids and certainly nothing to do with modern Druidism.

“The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.”

Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders.

The hippie-turned-New Age movements birthed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a surge of interest in Stonehenge. Tens of thousands, not all of them Druids, attended the Stonehenge Free People’s Festival starting in 1974. In 1985, the festival was halted by English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge today, because of the crowds, disorder, and vandalism. Druids were also banned from performing rituals on site. However, English Heritage and the Druids soon came to an understanding: Druids could use the site as long as there was no associated festival.

So the clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge.

Modern paganism is not without interest, of course, but continuing revelations about prehistory—whether of neolithic Britain or elsewhere—should be a lot more interesting. As are the techniques used to extract data from the past: an example used to telling effect by the Stonehenge Riverside Project is the analysis of lipid remains on pottery: we can tell if the pot held dairy products or the fat of ruminants or pigs, giving insights into the diet four thousand years ago. Another example: strontium isotope in bovine molars show that beef consumed at Durrington Walls was raised at least thirty miles away.

Of course, all this is not as photogenically mysterious/magical as robed Druids in the long shadows of a midwinter sunset. Academic archaeology, which suffers from charges of “elitism” in the reactionary populist politics of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, has a hard time competing with the popular irrationality of mysticism. Maybe the real Stonehenge needs more publicists.

This article Stonehenge came before the Druids (long, long before the Druids) is featured on Big Think.

One June 29, a local man was walking along the beach on the island of Khortytsia, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, when he noticed what looked like a log half submerged in water. When he approached, he realized the log was part of a boat, one that was possibly centuries old.

The man called wardens at the Khortytsia National Reserve, the large national park on the island. Soon the police arrived to cordon off the area, followed by engineers and archaeologists who started an operation to rescue the precious find.

Less than a month earlier, an explosion had destroyed the Russian-controlled Kakhovka Dam, 125 miles downriver from Khortytsia. The waters rushed downstream, swelling the Dnipro River and eventually flooding a huge portion of the region. Dozens of villages were submerged, livestock and crops destroyed, and communities cut off and isolated.

Satellite imagery of the dam before and after its destruction. (Wikimedia Commons)

But the ecological and economic disaster also had an unexpected consequence: As the Kakhovka Reservoir emptied, it exposed thousands of artifacts. In an area never fully explored by archaeologists before the dam’s construction, there was suddenly the prospect of uncovering significant finds, including old boats—perhaps even one long sought by scholars of Cossack maritime history: a classic early chaika, as iconic in Ukrainian history as the longship is in Scandinavia. It was the promise of finding such treasures that drew both archaeologists and curious civilians to the newly exposed shoreline.

Khortytsia, the largest island on the Dnipro, was lucky not to be flooded when the Kakhovka Dam was constructed in the mid-20th century. The island is home to numerous historical settlements, from Stone Age sites to a Mennonite colony established more than two centuries ago.

In Ukrainian history, Khortytsia is synonymous with the Zaporozhian Cossacks, or “Cossacks from beyond the rapids.” The name refers to the Dnipro’s formerly famous treacherous waters; the rapids disappeared when Soviet-built dams transformed the river and surrounding landscape. The Zaporozhian Cossacks were a community formed in the late Middle Ages. Like other Cossack groups, they were known for semi-democratic governance, a significant level of autonomy, and engaging in military campaigns, both on land and sea, often as mercenaries. Khortytsia was a significant Cossack base in the 16th-18th centuries, and is believed by some to have been the site of their first headquarters. Khortytsia seemed like an excellent place to discover a much-sought early classic chaika. Such a find would become a national treasure.

However, archaeologists quickly determined that the boat discovered in June was not their missing link in Cossack maritime history—but it has a historical significance all its own, and may date to a pre-Cossack settlement on Khortytsia that existed from the 10th through early 15th centuries.

The boat is a dugout canoe, made from a tree trunk, likely oak, that was split in half and hollowed out. It is 6.7 meters, or about 22 feet long, and narrow, less than a meter (about three feet) wide. Once freed from the sandy riverbed, it fell apart into several pieces, which were carefully moved to a nearby hangar. Here, the dugout will be conserved by soaking the pieces in a solution that hardens the wood and prevents it from shrinking when it dries. Eventually it will join the collection of the Museum of Navigation in southern Khortytsia.

Oleh Tuboltsev, a Khortytsia National Reserve archaeologist working on the find, says the team sent samples of the wood to Poland for radiocarbon dating, which will help determine the boat’s age. The boat will help researchers learn more about regional boatbuilding evolution, and, crucially, gives them hope of finding other, even more valuable discoveries.

That’s because the dugout boat is a direct ancestor of the elusive early chaika. The dugout was a simple but durable boat for navigating the dangerous rapids. When the Cossacks arrived in the area in the 15th century, they began improving it, such as covering it with bull hide for better hydrodynamics. Chaikas continued to evolve, as did their reputation for maneuverability in naval conflicts. They eventually became one of the most recognizable Ukrainian cultural symbols. While more modern Cossack boats from the 18th century have been found in the past, archaeologists continue to look for a surviving, classic chaika from this early period—and believe the dam destruction, while tragic, provides new opportunities.

“What was hidden may become visible, so we are looking forward to new discoveries,” says Tuboltsev.

The war makes it impossible to conduct excavations, so archaeologists are limited to doing surveys and monitoring newly exposed areas. Already there have been numerous finds, from a first-century Roman silver coin to German helmets from World War II. And, while the Ukrainian government began planning to rebuild the dam immediately after its destruction, others are advocating for restoring the historical, pre-Soviet Dnipro River landscape.

This southeastern corner of the country is the heart of Cossack land.

The area is “one of the most important natural and historical objects for Ukraine,” says Oleksii Vasyliuk, an ecologist and activist with the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. Vasyliuk was a coauthor on a report prepared by the group urging that the dam not be rebuilt and the river’s natural floodplains be restored instead. Environmentally, such a move would increase forest cover, restore biodiversity, and improve water quality. The team also pointed to the area’s cultural value.

“This part of the Dnipro valley is the cradle of Ukrainian statehood and a concentration of colossal historical and archaeological heritage,” says Vasyliuk. It has also been little studied.

Oleksandr Alfyorov, from the Institute of the History of Ukraine, calls this southeastern corner of the country “the heart of [Cossack lands],” and adds “To flood again the historical artifacts that are part of national identity is a difficult decision.”

However, that decision is likely to be made. Tuboltsev tries to be realistic, noting that thousands of homes, businesses, and farms depended on the reservoir for their water supply, and there simply may not be other options.

“In the meantime, we should get the most out of the situation by monitoring the banks for artifacts,” he says, pragmatically. “Archaeologists of the past never had such a goldmine.”

This article The Kakhovka Dam disaster revealed an archaeological “goldmine” is featured on Big Think.

Sugar was a scheming concubine. She not only shared the bed of the Sultan, but she whispered in his ear. This night, Sugar told Ibrahim that one of his harem — she knew not who — had slept with an outsider. One of his women had been defiled. Ibrahim was furious. He had his Chief Black Eunuch investigate. He had women tortured. But either they would not give up the culprit or there was none. So, Ibrahim had all 280 women in his harem gathered together. He ordered they each be tied in a sack, weighed down with stones, and thrown into the Bosporus Strait. All but one drowned.

This was merely one of the twisted acts of the Ottoman Empire’s worst Sultan, Ibrahim “the Mad,” who was in charge from 1640 to 1648.

The kafes

Primogeniture is the law of succession, where rule and title are passed down to the eldest born son. And however unfair and peculiar it seems to us today, it was much better than the alternative. In the Ottoman Empire, there was no right of the eldest. All sons had equal claim to the throne. This meant that when the serving Sultan died, there was a frantic, Machiavellian power struggle between siblings. They would gather their retinue, weave their webs, and murder one another. When one was declared Sultan, they would, invariably, have their remaining siblings strangled to death with a silk bow string (since spilling royal blood was forbidden). It’s thought that Sultan Mehmet III executed 19 of his pre-teen brothers.

Public opinion turned against such un-Quranic behavior, and Ahmed I was a kind, gentle sovereign. He decided that rather than kill his siblings, he would lock them in a secluded corner of the palace, under constant guard and with no meaningful interaction with the outside world. This kafes or “cage” was where Prince Ibrahim spent 20 years of his life.

One need not be a clinical psychologist to imagine the damage two decades of solitary confinement would do to a person. Ibrahim was not only isolated, but he also lived under constant fear for his life. All his brothers had been strangled to death. So, Ibrahim lived thinking that every knock on the door and every smiling servant could just as well be an executioner.

Unfit for rule

Ibrahim was so traumatized that when the grand vizier of the palace came to tell him he was now Sultan, he wouldn’t believe him. He thought it was a ruse to kill him. It was only when the body of his now-dead brother, Murad, was brought out below his window that he joyfully leapt to the job.

Ibrahim was an awful ruler and a sadistic, depraved person. As the journalist and historian Noel Barber put it, “Once on the throne, Ibrahim proved to be the most detestable and debauched of all the Ottoman sultans.” Even putting aside his personal perversions and viewing him with the objectivity of a historian, Ibrahim was a weak, ineffective leader. He drained the palace coffers with his whims; he started a pointless war with Venice; and he lost swathes of territory to Iran in the east, the Russians in the north, and the Habsburgs in the west.

The Ottomans laid siege to a Venetian coastal fortress on Crete for years, which was hugely expensive and distracted his armies when they were already overstretched. When the army returned home for the winter, exhausted and poor, not only did Ibrahim demand taxes from them, but he also insisted they return to the fight. The general leading the fleet refused (since sailing in the winter was a death sentence), and he was executed not long after.

Ibrahim the Mad

But it’s his personal predilections that earned Ibrahim the moniker “the mad.” He had the virgins in his harem lined up in the palace gardens so he could rape them. He would have orgies in mirror-lined rooms where his concubines were “mares” and he was a “stallion,” and he would have sex with as many as he could before he tired. He adorned his beard with diamonds and drenched the palace furnishings in an amber perfume (which is known to make people woozy). When one of his concubines told him a story about a “sable king,” he became obsessed. He demanded his men go to every corner of the empire to bring back sable. He had palace walls lined with it. He even had cats wear sable coats.

All of this was ignored by quivering sycophants worried for their lives. It’s hard to pin down which event was “too far,” but two stand out. The first was the murder of the entire 280-woman harem. The second was when he raped the daughter of a very important person. Ibrahim had spotted the beautiful daughter of his Grand Mufti (the chief Islamic legal scholar) at the baths, and he demanded to be married to her. She refused (likely because she knew of his temperament), and Ibrahim went into a rage. He had his men kidnap her. Ibrahim raped her for days, then sent her back home. From that moment on, the Grand Mufti vowed to never rest until Ibrahim was killed.

The end of terror

Everyone agreed that Ibrahim had to go. The civil, religious, and military authorities of the Ottoman Empire came together and conspired to oust the Sultan. The leaders of the jannissaries, the elite footmen of the Ottoman army, went to the Grand Mufti to seek his blessing and that of Islam on their deposition. Of course, he gave it. When the men came for Ibrahim, not one guard stood up in his defense. He was taken back to the cage. This was not enough for the Grand Mufti, who signed off on a writ to have Ibrahim executed by silk cord. And so, ten days after losing the throne, Ibrahim was strangled to death.

The story of Ibrahim the Mad stands out for its shocking depravity. In fact, some historians have argued that the stories are so lurid and so insane that we might have reason to doubt them. As with any dynasty, if you are hoping to dethrone and replace a monarch, you want to establish grievances first. You want to establish your own legitimate claim to the throne. So, it’s not unlikely that some of the accounts have been exaggerated to defame Ibrahim in history.

But even if we dilute the chronicles a bit and take more than a pinch of salt, we are still left with a weak and ineffective leader when the Ottoman Empire needed the opposite. Ibrahim was venal, vain, and violent — one of the most notorious and terrible rulers in history.

This article The detestable, debauched life of Ibrahim the Mad — the Ottoman Empire’s worst Sultan is featured on Big Think.

“Going to the bathroom” is a ubiquitous euphemism for using the toilet. But, as historian Alison K. Hoagland explains, the current norm of having the bathtub, toilet, and sink all in one room is a relatively new thing. Drawing on her own visits to old houses in the copper mining towns of northern Michigan, she tells the story of how working-class American homes gradually acquired bathrooms.

For the upper classes, Hoagland writes, plumbed-in amenities arrived piecemeal in the nineteenth century. Sinks were installed first in bedrooms, as a replacement for the pitchers of water and basins that had previously been ferried in and out by servants. Bathtubs and toilets each got their own rooms—with toilets placed farther away from living spaces due to the smell.

Starting in the 1870s, health professionals urged architects to place all three fixtures together to reduce the mess of pipes and traps running through the house. Builders delicately decided to name the resulting room for the bath rather than the toilet, and by the 1880s, the term “bath room” or “bath-room” was common.

Middle-class homeowners gradually followed the wealthy, adding “bath-rooms” to existing homes or buying new ones that included them from the start. But few working-class families could afford to buy new homes, and retrofitting buildings to add bathrooms was expensive too. So, like the wealthy decades earlier, but for different reasons, they placed fixtures in different places throughout the home.

For most working-class homes, the first fixture was the kitchen sink. Even without indoor plumbing, these could be filled using buckets and drained with pipes that emptied out under the house or in the yard. Once a home got running water, the kitchen sink could also serve for washing, toothbrushing, and shaving.

As bathing became a middle-class norm over the course of the nineteenth century, social reformers attempted to bring baths to “the great unwashed.” But even those working-class families with the resources and desire to build their own bathing facilities didn’t necessarily follow the pattern of the rich. Hoagland points to some Finnish-American miners who built family saunas used for childbirth, folk therapies, and laundry as well as bathing.

Meanwhile, before indoor toilets, working-class households used outhouses and chamber pots. In one case Hoagland points to, men simply urinated into the yard from a window. Toilets were more difficult to install than sinks or tubs—drainage pipes needed to connect to cesspools or sewer systems to avoid threats to health. In Michigan, where the climate made frozen pipes a danger, they were often installed in dirt-floored basements—which, in some cases, meant that going to the toilet required a descent through a trapdoor.

Eventually, most working-class houses did get their own dedicated three-fixture rooms. Many of the miners’ homes Hoagland visited were retrofitted after World War II, with bathrooms squeezed into spaces broken off from a kitchen or dining room, or expanded from basement toilet rooms with staircases added for convenience. At long last, miners and their families could literally go to the bathroom.

This article Bathrooms didn’t exist until the 19th century is featured on Big Think.

There is a standard model for population growth and decline. For most of human history, life has been hard. It has meant starvation, plague, and high child mortality. And so, human societies had lots of children. If many people died, a population needed to have many more children to compensate. Eventually, living standards increase (through education and development), and overall mortality drops. There’s a century or so lag in cultural norms in which people still have lots of children, but they’re not dying as much. A population explosion ensues. But eventually, things normalize. The population stagnates and then declines, as the smaller population enjoys greater prosperity. Most countries, and most of history, is governed by this model.

But not France. In the history of demography, France stands out as an awkward aberration. Around the 18th century — during a time when the country was still very poor with high mortality — France experienced a population decline. In the 1700s, the French stopped having enough children to compensate for the vast number of people dying. Historians have long speculated about what caused this anomaly. According to a new paper from the University of Manchester, we now have an answer: secularization.

The French attitude to religion

The French Revolution of 1789 was, among other things, heavy-handedly secular. The new French governments in the wake of the revolution destroyed Christian statues and took down crosses, and the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being replaced any formal, organized religion. But French secularization began long before 1789. In his paper, Guillaume Blanc noted several markers of this. First, secular wills (rather than religious) increased from 10% in 1710 to 80% by 1780. Second, there were far fewer clergymen per capita at the end of the 18th century compared to its beginning.

What’s more, in the centuries before the French Revolution, France had suffered religious wars and sectarian persecution. After the Wars of Religion (1562-1598), France was hugely divided, with Catholic areas and Protestant areas. Such divisions allowed Blanc to examine secularization in France as a whole as well as regionally.

Declining fertility and secularization

Blanc discovered that, both nationally and regionally, greater secularization correlated with lower birth rates. When the French became more secular, they had fewer children. In the areas of France with more clergy (a proxy for greater religiosity), there were more children. Of course, this makes sense. When you take away a faith that encourages you to have children, you no longer feel the need to do so.

Was secularization the sole cause of this population decline? Blanc believes the answer is yes. He writes:

“Neither literacy, nor population density, or urbanization had a significant or large effect on the timing of transition [to reduced fertility]. These results suggest that the accumulation of human capital, pre-industrial, or contemporary development were not drivers of the transition in France, in line with the evidence at the macroeconomic level.”

Even accounting for other factors, secularization appeared to be the primary catalyst reducing France’s population.

Baby boom in Britain

Today, France is considerably smaller than Germany and roughly the same size as the UK. But in the 18th century, roughly one in six Europeans was French. They were, by a large margin, the most populous nation on the continent. It is illuminating to compare how France and Britain evolved over the ensuing decades.

Great Britain was the first and leading nation of the Industrial Revolution. During the 1700s, education, productivity, and quality of life all improved considerably in England and Wales. And, as the standard model predicts, the population increased. Since the Industrial Revolution also meant a huge economic boom, British per capita GDP also increased. In other words, Britain got bigger and richer.

France, though, industrialized much later. As Blanc put it, “In every respect, 18th-century France lagged one to two hundred years behind England, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.” Yet its per capita GDP mirrored Britain’s almost perfectly. How? Because of France’s declining birth rates. The French had fewer people to enjoy the collective wealth in the country. Therefore, “the French achieved the same growth in income per capita after 1760, simply by challenging the authority of the Church and reducing fertility, therefore limiting the increase in the denominator.”

C’est comme ça

Blanc’s paper is not meant to revise the established model of population change. The reason France is interesting is because it’s different, so it would be perilous to apply these conclusions — namely, that secularization leads to population decline — beyond 18th-century France. C’est comme ça.

This article Does secularization cause population decline? It did in France is featured on Big Think.

We like to think of technological innovation as a gradual, steady, and fairly linear process. However, this is not necessarily the case. Archaeological excavations throughout the world reveal that, once in a while, ancient civilizations developed inventions that were decades if not centuries ahead of their time.

It is sometimes said that these inventions rival or outmatch modern science. This, too, is a misconception. While many ancient super technologies — from Roman concrete to Damascus steel — were once lost, they have since been recreated by present-day researchers. Usually, any difficulty in recreating them stems from the lack of original instruction rather than an inability to comprehend the invention itself.

Equally erroneous is the notion that ancient civilizations stumbled upon these technologies by accident, or that they were designed by idiosyncratic geniuses who were not representative of their day and age. Although many inventors mentioned in this article were indeed considered geniuses, they cannot and should not be separated from their surroundings. Their work is not anachronistic, but a testament to the ingenuity and scientific potential of their respective civilizations.

Greek fire: flames that don’t go out

When the Muslim fleet of the Umayyad Caliphate attempted to lay siege to the Byzantine city of Constantinople in 674, their ships were doused in flames. At first, the Muslims were not alarmed; fire was often used in naval warfare and could be put out easily with cloth, dirt, or water. This, however, was no ordinary fire. Once ignited, it could not be extinguished, and after the entire fleet had burned down, even the sea itself was set ablaze.

The Umayyad Caliphate met its doom at the hands of a new military invention known as Greek fire, Roman fire, liquid fire, or sea fire, among many other names. No recipe survives, but historians speculate it might have involved petroleum, sulfur, or gunpowder. Of the three, petroleum seems the likeliest candidate, as gunpowder didn’t become readily available in Asia Minor until the 14^th century, and sulfur lacked the destructive power described by Arab observers.

However, what makes Greek fire so impressive is not the chemistry of the fire itself but the design of the pressure pump the Byzantines used to launch it in the direction of their enemies. As the British historian John Haldon discusses in an essay titled “‘Greek Fire’ Revisited,” researchers struggle to recreate an historically accurate pump that could have propelled its content far enough to be of any use during naval battles, where enemy ships may be dozens or even hundreds of meters removed from one another.

Antikythera mechanism: a cosmic clock before Copernicus

The Antikythera mechanism was found off the coast of Antikythera, a small Greek island located between Kythera and Crete. Its discovery occurred in 1901, when divers in search of sea sponges stumbled upon a deposit of sunken wreckage from classical antiquity. The titular contraption was incomplete and in poor condition, but seemed to have consisted of some 37 bronze gears stored inside a wooden box.

Scholars initially speculated that the Antikythera mechanism, which was found to be over 2,200 years old, had functioned as an ancient computer. This hypothesis was written off as being too improbable, only to be reaffirmed by more detailed studies from the 1970s. The current consensus holds the mechanism was an orrery: a model of the solar system that calculates and tracks celestial time.

CT scans reveal the contraption’s mindboggling complexity. A 2021 attempt at replicating the Antikythera mechanism referred to it as “a creation of genius — combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy, and ancient Greek astronomical theories.” It could calculate the ecliptic longitudes of the moon and sun, the phases of the moon, the synodic phases of the planets, the excluded days of the Metonic Calendar, and the Olympiad cycle, among a myriad of other things.

Damascus steel: swords that will not dull

Damascus steel swords originated in the Middle East during the 9^th century and were renowned for their appearance as well as their durability, being multiple times stronger and sharper than the Western swords used during the Crusades. Their name, derived from the Arabic word for “water,” references not only the Syrian city from which they hailed but also the flowing pattern that adorns their surface. This pattern was created during a unique forging process where small ingots of wootz steel sourced from India, Sri Lanka, or Iran were melted with charcoal and cooled at an incredibly slow rate.

The demand for Damascus steel remained high for centuries, but gradually diminished as swords were replaced with firearms in armed conflicts; by 1850, the secrets of its production process appeared lost.    

Interest in the swords was revitalized by C.S. Smith, a metallurgist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Unfortunately, Damascus steel can never be recreated authentically as wootz steel is no longer available. Since the 1960s, however, researchers have tried to develop new forging techniques that achieve similar results. This development is still ongoing; one study from 2018 claims adding small levels of carbide-forming elements like Vanadium (V) is the way to go.

The Houfeng Didong Yi: the world’s first seismoscope

Created almost 2000 years ago, the Houfeng Didong Yi holds the honor of being the world’s first seismoscope. Its place of origin was China, a country that has been plagued by earthquakes for as long as its inhabitants can remember. Its creator was Zhang Heng, a distinguished astronomer, cartographer, mathematician, poet, painter, and inventor who lived under the Han Dynasty from 78 to 139 AD.

The design of the Houfeng Didong Yi is as functional as it is aesthetically pleasing. The mechanism consists of a large, decorated copper pot. The pot was fitted with eight tubed projections that were shaped to look like dragon heads. Below each dragon head was placed a copper toad with a large, gaping mouth. 

“Zhang’s seismoscope,” one 2009 study from Taiwan explains, “is respected as a milestone invention since it can indicate not only the occurrence of an earthquake but also the direction to its source.” While primary sources are unclear as to how the seismoscope actually worked, researchers suggest that vibrations caused a pendulum inside the pot to swing, causing a small ball to release through a dragon head and into the mouth of its corresponding toad, indicating the direction of an earthquake.

Roman concrete: cement that does not crack

Many architectural projects of ancient Rome would not have been possible without Roman concrete. Also known as opus caementicium, Roman concrete was a hydraulic-setting cement mix consisting of volcanic ash and lime that, in the words of Pliny the Elder, bound rock fragments into “a single stone mass” and made them “impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.”

The earliest-known reference to Roman concrete dates to 25 BC and comes from a manuscript titled Ten Books on Architecture, written by the architect and engineer Vitruvius. Vitruvius recommends builders use volcanic ash from the city of Pozzuoli in Naples, called pozzolana or pulvis puteolanus in Latin. Pozzolana should be mixed with lime at a ratio of 3:1 or 2:1 if the construction is under water.

When Vitruvius wrote his Ten Books on Architecture, Roman concrete was still considered a novelty and used sparingly. This changed in 64 AD, when an urban fire destroyed two thirds of the imperial capital. As the survivors set out to rebuild, Nero’s building code called for stronger foundations. The switch to Roman concrete — which, true to Pliny’s words, does not crack — enabled the construction of architectural projects like the Pantheon, the world’s oldest and biggest unreinforced dome. 

Baghdad battery: a rudimentary taser (for pain relief)

Archaeologists use the term “Baghdad battery” to refer to a ceramic pot, copper tube, and iron rod that were found in Iraq near what was once the capital of both the Parthian and subsequent Sasanian Empire. They believe the three distinct objects once fitted together to create a single device. The purpose of this device, which seems to have been capable of generating electricity, remains unclear.

Wilhelm König, director of the Iraq Antiquities Department — the same organization whose employees first found the battery — originally theorized that it was used as a galvanic cell to electroplate objects. This theory, though widely accepted upon its initial publication, does not hold up as no electroplated objects from the same time period and region have been discovered so far.

In 1993, Paul Keyser from the University of Alberta in Edmonton formulated a different, less anachronistic and therefore more plausible hypothesis. The battery, he argued, functioned not as a galvanic cell but a local analgesic that could relieve pain through transmitting an electrical charge. In doing so, it would have replaced electric fish, which in Greco-Roman societies were sometimes used to treat headaches, gout, and other conditions.   

This article Ancient technology that was centuries ahead of its time is featured on Big Think.

In 19th-century Scotland, a corpse is worth less in summer than in winter. It’s all to do with the rate of decomposition and the quality of the cadaver. If you’re a surgeon at the dawn of physiology, corpses matter. You need a specimen with flesh intact and organs mostly whole. So, in the heady heat of June, you would get $1200 for a body in today’s money. Fresh from the frozen graves of December, you would get closer to $1500. That’s good earning for a body; it would have been several months’ salary for a working man.

In the 1800s, Dr. Robert Knox was doing two public anatomical dissections a day for the people of Edinburgh. He was drawing sellout crowds and developing quite a reputation as well as a bloated bank account. But there was one morgue-sized problem: There weren’t enough bodies to use. Scottish law at the time limited medical dissection to criminals, suicides, or orphans. So, the wily and macabre criminal entrepreneurs of Midlothian would rob graves; they would dig up corpses and sell them on a very black market. For a while, this satisfied the anatomical appetites of unscrupulous surgeons.

By 1827, though, this was no longer so lucrative. First, the 1823 Judgment of Death Act substantially reduced the roll of executable offenses, resulting in fewer hanged bodies. Second, people were getting really annoyed that their dead relatives were being dug up, so the law came down heavily on grave robbing. Finally, people were making it harder. Corpses were locked in iron cages, and guards were placed at graveyard gates. You could even pay to have a huge, multi-ton stone put on your grave until enough time passed for the body to rot away its value.

Into this came William Burke and William Hare.

A spree of drunken murder

Burke and Hare were Irishmen who met while working a harvest outside of Edinburgh. They became notorious for being drunk, bolshy, and antisocial, but they were only ever petty criminals. Burke had a tenant, a man called Old Donald, who had the insolence to die before he could pay his rent. Old Donald owed Burke £4 in back rent, a hefty sum then. When the council delivered a coffin for Old Donald, Burke and his mate Hare cooked up a plan: They stuffed the coffin full of wood chips and hid Old Donald’s corpse under the bed. The councilmen took the coffin without a question, and Burke and Hare whisked their cadaver to Robert Knox. Knox’s assistant, who was not the one to ask questions, paid £8 for the body. As the two Irishmen were going, the assistant remarked that he “would be glad to see them again when they had another to dispose of.”

Old Donald had died from natural causes, but it didn’t take long for a criminal germ to grow into a homicidal business. Why wait for a body to die? Why not speed the process along a bit? Over the course of the next ten months, Burke and Hare murdered dozens of people. They almost always targeted the same kinds of people: drunks, beggars, prostitutes, and travelers who were unlucky enough to be boarding with either Burke or Hare. In other words, they were the forgettable underclass of Victorian Britain, where police wouldn’t bother to investigate. Burke and Hare’s modus operandi was largely the same for each murder. They would get their victim paralytically drunk with whisky and revelry. Then they would suffocate them. Suffocation was the best way to ensure the body remained fresh.

The unscrupulous clients

Every criminal transaction needs a buyer, and in this case, it was the surgeon, Robert Knox. Knox was an old surgeon from the Napoleonic battlefields, but his reputation played second best to that of another Edinburgh anatomist, Alexander Monro. Knox was desperate to prove himself, and his twice-a-day anatomy lessons needed topping up. So, when two Irishmen with remarkably fresh corpses arrived, he wasn’t one to ask questions. A common rhyme was sung at the time: “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, and Knox the man who buys the beef.”

Knox was never arrested in the end, but he must have known. At one time, a grandmother and her grandson were jammed together into a herring barrel and delivered to Knox by a porter. Still, no questions were asked. Then, one victim, Mary Paterson, was still warm when she was delivered. Not only did Knox’s assistant not raise an alarm, he pickled the corpse in a whiskey barrel for three months to avoid suspicion. Finally, when Burke and Hare brought in the freshly murdered body of begging street performer James Wilson, some of Knox’s team recognized him. Wilson had deformed feet and a scarred face. Did Knox call the police? No, he decapitated Wilson’s body and removed his feet before that afternoon’s public dissection. Of course, Knox knew.

A corpse too far

The reason Burke and Hare’s story has appealed so far through the ages is the sheer audacity of the pair. Theirs is a story of classical hubris, where boldness and daring soon spill over into arrogant stupidity. Once, a police constable was walking home with a drunk lady. Burke offered to take her home. The police officer said yes (he must have been very green), and the pair murdered her. Once, Burke’s cousin-in-law came to visit, and they murdered her.

Eventually, their audacity was their undoing. They wanted to murder a new lodger called Margaret Docherty, but had an issue: Two other lodgers, James and Ann Grey, wouldn’t leave for them to get about it. So Burke and Hare paid for the Greys to temporarily move houses so they could kill Docherty. The Greys came back the next day and found the body of Docherty still in their room, buried in straw. Burke and Hare hadn’t even thought to hide the corpse.

The Greys went straight to the police, and the police went straight to Burke’s house. The pair were arrested, but the police found the case hard. All the bodies — and so, all the evidence — were now in the biomedical waste bins of Knox’s basement. So, they got Hare to “turn king’s evidence,” which means he and his wife were offered immunity if he confessed to all the crimes. He did, and Burke was sentenced to be hanged on January 28, 1829.

Gruesomely ever after

While Hare and his wife, as well as Burke’s wife, were not sentenced by the law, they were sentenced by the mob. Crowds followed them around, beating them and threatening vigilante justice until the police locked the three of them up in prison for their own protection. When the mob went home and cooled off, they were all left to flee as they chose. We don’t know entirely where they ended up.

Knox was never arrested, but public opinion turned against him. He was struck off by the Royal College of Surgeons and banned from lecturing. He moved to London, but his notoriety and his crimes followed him southward, and he never recovered his reputation.

As for Burke, at his sentencing, the judge openly told him and the court, “Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized.” Which is what happened. Alexander Monro, the greatest surgeon in Edinburgh, put on quite a show. He performed the anatomization in a rammed lecture hall and did various macabre flourishes, like dip his quill in Burke’s blood to write a memo. And, if you ever find yourself in Edinburgh, you can still see Burke’s skeleton on display.

This article Doctors needed corpses for dissection. So two men murdered people to provide them is featured on Big Think.

Founded sometime between 600 BC and 250 AD, the Maya city of Tikal counts nearly 5,000 buildings that take up an area of 10 square miles. Ruling over a territory stretching from the jungles of Honduras to the upper edges of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, it was abandoned during the 10th century, when overpopulation, warfare, and successive droughts caused the Maya civilization to shrink and fragment.

Much like Machu Picchu in Peru, Tikal temporarily dropped off the map before being “rediscovered” by modern society. Known only to local villagers, it was (mercifully) overlooked by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés on his journey into the Maya heartland. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, British explorers credited with unearthing numerous Guatemalan temples, also missed the ruins. It wasn’t until 1848 that they were visited by the country’s central government, which christened them “Tikal,” after the Maya word for “at the water hole.”

Visiting the ruins of Tikal in northern Guatemala today is like traveling back in time. Hidden within the rain forest, much of the ancient Maya city has been reclaimed by nature. Spider monkeys jump from treetop to treetop and, on occasion, can even be seen scaling the steps of one of the archaeological site’s six excavated pyramids. The area is littered with coatis, a member of the raccoon family native to Central America famous for their fluffy, upright tails. If you don’t watch your step, you might feel the silky, black legs of a tarantula crawling over your foot or (if you are less fortunate) experience the excruciating sting of the bullet ant, the most painful in the insect kingdom — equal, as the animal’s name suggests, to being shot by a gun.

Nowadays, the pyramids and other structures are inhabited mainly by bats, dangling from the dilapidated ceilings. However, in 750 AD, the zenith of the Maya Empire’s glory days, the city was home to over 60,000 human beings. In addition to the handful of surviving hieroglyphs and codices, hints of their complex and sophisticated way of life are preserved through their timeless architecture.

Maize and tobacco

Reconstructing the routines and responsibilities of ordinary Maya is a daunting task. This is not only because the majority of their artifacts and written records have been destroyed, but also because the ones that survived tend to prioritize the experiences of gods and upper-class individuals over those of the regular people that served them.

A rare exception to this rule is a “painted pyramid” uncovered at Mexico’s Calakmul site containing murals that depict unnamed, unidentifiable Maya — men, women, and children — apparently doing what Maya did. In one panel, a man with a large pot and a spoon, labeled “maize gruel person” in hieroglyphics, stands by another man drinking from a bowl. In another, a women with a woven basket hands out tamales made from maize. A third shows people preparing and transporting food in rope-tied bundles carried with a tumpline over their foreheads, while a fourth, labelled “tobacco person,” represents what must be people processing the psychoactive plant in cylindrical clay vessels. Not every image on the pyramid has been deciphered, however: among the unsolved mysteries is a figure with a pole stand and a scarlet macaw perched on top, as well as unidentifiable pin-like objects protruding from baskets.

Tobacco was almost as important for the Maya as maize was, with panels showcasing its cultivation and consumption popping up in ruins throughout Central America. Smoked through ornate pipes or packed in cigar-like bundles, tobacco was largely restricted to rituals and ceremonies — a practice that continues with the Maya’s present-day descendants, who believe the smoke can ward off evil spirits.

Growing up Maya

In Maya society, few events were as significant as the birth of a child. Both a sign of good luck and a measure of personal wealth, Maya children had two names: their official name, given to them by a priest, and their nickname, given to them by their parents.

The Maya had a specific definition of beauty, and children were subjected to various body modifications to help them meet societal standards in adulthood. After infants had been given their priestly name, their parents would place a small bead between their eyes, causing them to become cross-eyed. Next, wooden planks were bound to the sides of their head, molding their soft skulls into a flatter, more desirable shape. Piercings, in the nose, ears, and lips, came later.

Maya society maintained strict gender norms. At age five, boys were given white beads to weave into their hair, while girls received red shells they wore around their waist — accessories that symbolized their purity and innocence, and which they wore until they completed the ceremony that marked the end of childhood and the start of adolescence. For boys, this ceremony took place when they were 14; for girls, when they were 12.

Maya girls growing up in Tikal would have lived with their parents until they got married, with their mothers teaching them how to cook and weave. Single men, by contrast, lived with other single men in communal houses, where they learned various crafts and trained for war. This period in the “single adult” Maya’s life was short-lived, as men on average married at age 18 and women at 15. After marriage, couples moved in with the family of the bride, with the husband helping out his father-in-law.

Maya gender norms, however strict, shifted as the empire developed. According to archaeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor, women’s roles greatly expanded during the glory days of 600 to 800 AD, with some exerting influence as priestesses or, in select cases, as warrior-queens.

Blood, the mortar of Maya ritual life

In the center of Tikal, at a plaza enclosed by three different pyramids, are the ruins of what tour guides note was once a court for playing pitz. Also known as pok-a-tok, this mix between soccer, volleyball, and basketball saw players try to bounce a rubber ball through a stone hoop using only their elbows, knees, and hips. Pitz was not just played for recreational purposes, but also to settle political and religious disputes. If two communities were odds, or someone challenged the sovereign, games would decide who was right and who was wrong.

Contemporary fascination with pitz has helped perpetuate the notion that the Maya were, by and large, a peace-loving people that avoided armed conflict at all costs. This interpretation of the empire was championed by leading archaeologists like J. Eric Thompson, who famously argued that sites like Tikal were little more than religious centers, populated only during important ceremonies. His argument fell apart as excavations revealed the “water hole” was indeed a fully-functioning city, inhabited not only by priests and astronomers, but also by farmers, merchants, and professional soldiers. Beginning in the 1960s, the long-awaited decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs further challenged Thompson’s thesis, as their surviving texts were filled with stories of battles, sacrifices, and torture.

“Blood,” epigrapher Linda Schele and art historian Mary Miller wrote in their 1986 book The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, “was the mortar of ancient Maya ritual life.”

Far from a unified whole, the Maya civilization was a network of loosely connected fiefdoms vying for control over one another. Tikal was no exception, with translated hieroglyphs revealing an eventful military history. Inscriptions on an altar in the Maya city of Caracol in Belize tell that an alliance with another stronghold, Calakmul in Mexico, helped bring down their Guatemalan rival in 562. But Tikal did not remain subjugated for long: In 672, it launched a war against the nearby city of Dol Pilas, which — despite having been founded only 50 years before the conflict — was already styling itself as the water hole’s successor state.

Engravings on stairways in Dos Pilas record its catastrophic defeat, paving the way for Tikal’s rise as one of the undisputed leaders of the Maya world during its golden age.

This article Here’s what it was like to grow up in the Maya civilization is featured on Big Think.