Old bones can teach us a lot, but they have their limits. You can’t look at someone’s bones and deduce that he had a laugh like a sock going through a vacuum hose, for instance. Bones can only tell the cold facts of age, sex, and physical trauma; childbirth, arthritis, malnutrition and the like. Or so I thought. I…
Late in the fall of 1896, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, scholars fresh from Oxford took the steamer to Cairo. They wanted to become Famous Archaeologists during a period when the British were fascinated by ancient Egyptian artifacts. So fascinated that said artifacts were disappearing from Egypt like sliced grapes from a toddler’s plate. They decided to dig…
When you think about ancient technology, how often does potting soil come to mind? Well, it should. The soil of the Amazon is generally poor, acidic, and leaches nutrients like a sieve. Growing food there is a nightmare—unless you happen upon, or go looking for, some of the intensely fertile, beautiful black gold put there…
This is the story of the last person on earth, as told by a trash pile left on Henderson Island. Of course it’s a story from ancient history, so you and I know he wasn’t actually the last person, but he didn’t know that. He had every reason to believe he was the only human left, and he…
In 1942, a forest ranger discovered a lake full of human bones high in the Himalayans. And when I say Roopkund Lake is full of human bones—the remains of around three hundred people rest in the lake water. The area is remote. Before a lake packed with dead folks was discovered, the only people who…
In 1963, a man in Derinkuyu, Turkey, couldn’t keep his chickens from disappearing. The chickens were kept in an apparently safe location; his basement. No wild animals, no place for the feathered beasts to hide, right? So where did they go? One day he entered the basement in time to see a fluffy feathered rear…