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 [https://www.idesign.wiki/the-wheel/]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 [https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/j5nw51/snowball_fight_124_years_ago_lyon_france_1896/] , 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 [https://worldradiohistory.com/Bell_Laboratories_Record_Issue_Key.htm]. I opened a random issue from 1961 [https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Bell-Laboratories-Record/60s/Bell-Laboratories-Record-1961-10.pdf] and the

The authors of this paper [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31848342/] 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

MIT News published an article [https://news.mit.edu/2020/early-human-hot-springs-food-0915] recently hypothesising that early humans may have cooked their food in hot springs. They didn't have any compelling evidence, so I was sceptical, but people on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/

I stumbled across a project [https://historyin.co/] to convert black and white photos from Indian history to colour using machine learning based colourisation: > History in Color contains 1200+ Old and Historic Photographs of India from (1800s to 1940s) restored using advanced image

Historian Bret Devereaux [https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux] has a great four part series [https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/] on ancient agriculture. Highly recommended if you're interested in the subject. Some of the bits I found most interesting: From Part I

A globe [https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240] that lets you see what the Earth looked like tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. One interesting thing I learnt was that during the dinosaur extinction event (~66 million years ago [https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#

This [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle] ScienceMag piece covers an amazing recent discovery: A battle, over three thousand years ago, involving thousands of warriors in what is now Germany.

Interesting (and only mildly gross) article [https://www.ancient.eu/article/1239/toilets-in-a-medieval-castle/]from the Ancient History Encyclopedia on medieval castle toilets. Notable quote: > [...] there can be no doubt that a castle toilet stank to high heaven. Indeed, it was not uncommon to

This [https://www.pepysdiary.com/]might be the most accessible way to read the 17th century diary of Samuel Pepys' – as a blog with one post for each diary entry. Still quite a difficult read to be honest, with sentences like these: >

Interesting article [https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/medieval-university-monopoly]from History Today on why Oxford and Cambridge were the only legally allowed universities in England for centuries.

An interesting and short paper [https://fermatslibrary.com/s/ancient-babylonian-astronomers-calculated-jupiter-s-position-from-the-area-under-a-time-velocity-graph] of a recent (2016) discovery about Babylonian mathematics: over two thousand years ago, Babylonian astronomers figured out how to calculate Jupiter's position based on past observations of the planet's motion.

Incredible performance of the first few lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in Sumerian:

A short but interesting article [https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-ancient-history-of-board-games] on ancient boardgames.

Cambridge has digitized [https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/]some Newton's notebooks from his time as a student in Trinity College. It's in mix of English, Latin, and Greek. Unfortunately no translation seems to be available and even

At some point I hope to read The Canterbury Tales in the original middle English. There is just something enchanting about the language – it feels comprehensible while being just out of reach: > Ther n’ is no werkman whatever he be, That may both

The video is breathtaking, although somehow I doubt the streets were that clean.

Incredible.

300 million years ago, all of the Earth's landmass was bunched together in a single super-continent called Pangea. Here's [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/incredible-map-of-pangea-with-modern-borders/] what it would look like if we mapped today's border onto it.

The Ministry of Tourism in Egypt has created VR simulations of popular historical sites. Here's [https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=NeiMEZa9d93&mls=1] one for the tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses VI.