History

A well preserved street food stall was found in Pompeii recently (photos). It must have been in active use before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 AD). It's interesting how some things have changed little in two thousand years. You can still find very

Remarkable find: ice age (> 12,500 years old) rock paintings in Columbia show now extinct animals like Mastodons.

Luis Dias on Beethoven's business life: Once Beethoven had poured his creative energy to the fullest into a composition, he regarded it as commercial property, deserving the best possible price on the most favourable terms. Of the hundreds of his letters that have survived,

Mark Isaak has collected a large number of flood myths from across the world here. Here's one from Papua New Guinea, notice the resemblance to the Noah story: The wife of a very good man saw a very big fish. She called her husband,

The AskHistorians subreddit on what the best accepted explanation for Stonehenge is: They believe that Stonehenge is a domain of the dead; there are no signs of habitation there, there have been many high-status graves found, they suspect that the stone material is associated

A few days ago, I found myself wondering when people started shaving and how. Sculptures of Roman emperors depict most of them as clean shaven. How did people shave back then? Bust of Roman emperor Augustus / Source: Sailko / CC BY-SA 3.0Well it turns

The diary of Thomas Edison, covering the short period from 12 - 21 July 1885. Not much of scientific interest here, just some amusing bits: It has just occurred to me that the brain may digest certain portions of food, say the ethereal part,

How researchers figured out what Ancient Egyptian sounded like:

The Tabula Peutingeriana was an ancient map believed to have first been constructed by the ancient Romans, although the copy we have today was drawn in 1265. While reading Charles' Allen Coromandel: A Personal History of South India, I learnt about this map, and

The Roman Empire was huge: 5 million sq. km at its peak, larger than India (3.2 million sq. km), about half the size of the United States (9.8 million sq. km). And yet by population it was tiny: ~60 million, 5x smaller

In 1992 there was a remarkable archaeological finding in Greece: writing on a wooden tablet that turned out to be 7000 years old. From Wikipedia: The Dispilio tablet is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, unearthed during George Hourmouziadis's excavations of Dispilio in Greece,

One silver lining I hope we see from the pandemic is more museums creating virtual experiences. Google Arts & Culture already has a good collection of virtual exhibits from museums around the world. Here's one I've been enjoying recently: The Getty Book of the

By Aurbina - Own work, Public DomainI'd always been curious about the origins of the giant statues of Easter Island. Why, and how were they made? Then I found that Jared Diamond had written eloquently not only about the origins of the statues, but

Physicians who were university trained during the Renaissance considered surgery beneath them. They relegated operations—​which consisted mainly of bloodletting and amputations—​to the barbers; although they were merely apprenticeship trained, they had the sharpest knives. Paré was among this guild of barber-​surgeons.

What a reminder of how ridiculously hard engineering is: It still baffles me that we somehow figured out how to do such incredibly complex things.

How the wheel came to be. In a nutshell, someone realized rolling heavy objects on logs made them easier to transport. Incremental improvements from there eventually led to the invention of the wheeled cart.

Via Reddit, this amazing colorized video of a snowball fight from Lyon, 1896:

Sixty years of records (1925 to 1984) from Bell Labs have been digitized and are now free to read. I opened a random issue from 1961 and the very first article was on an interesting subject: simulating a training environment for Project Mercury.

The authors of this paper managed to extract an incredible amount of information from a 5700 year-old chewed up piece of birch pitch (a kind of tar used for a variety of things by early humans). They were able to sequence the genome of