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A South African anthropologist has asked permission to open the graves of William Shakespeare and his family to determine, among other things, what killed the Bard and whether his poems and plays may have been composed under the influence of marijuana. But while Shakespeare's skeleton could reveal clues about his health and death, the question of the man's drug use depends on the presence of hair, fingernails or toenails in the grave, said Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who floated the proposal to the Church of England. Thackeray...

Newly discovered notes from 15th-century Italy show that the decimal point is actually 150 years older than what historians previously believed. Decimal points may seem basic, but they’re incredibly helpful in math. They divide whole numbers into tenths, hundredths, and thousandths, which makes calculations a lot easier compared to using fractions. Some forms of decimals have been around since the 900s in Damascus and the 1200s in China, as reported by Live Science. A solid system of decimals didn’t become fully established until 1593. This happened when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius included decimals in astronomical work. However, recent studies...

Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph notes were his revisions for a third edition that never saw publication, offering rare insight into the mind of one of history's most important scientists and teachers.Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph...

Decimals in a trigonometry table in Tabulae primi mobilis B by Bianchini, written in the 15th century. (Van Brummelen, Hist. Math., 2024) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In 1593, German mathematician Christopher Clavius made a small mark that would change mathematics forever. In a sine table in his treatise on the astrolabe, Astrolabium, he indicated the fractionation of a whole number by writing what has come to be regarded as the very first use of the decimal point. There is, however, just one problem. According to new painstaking research by historian Glen Van Brummelen of Trinity Western University, this wasn't, in fact, its first...

...The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a project managed by the British Museum to address the lack of provision for metal detectorists (and the general public) to be able to notify relevant authorities of archaeological discoveries and document objects in a curated database...In the latest annual report that covers 2022, the PAS has documented 53,490 new submissions, 94% of which have been submitted by metal detectorists, and of which 1,384 have been reported as treasure under the Treasure Act 1996.Bronze Age: 1,210 objects were recorded, which include a stone wrist-guard, a gold hoard containing a decorated bracelet and two gold strips...

A Virginia woman is facing charges after she allegedly swung a medieval sword at a police officer and another person. The Leesburg Police Department announced on Monday that officers responded on Feb. 8 to the 800 block of Edwards Ferry Road to serve a warrant on 35-year-old Alexandra C. Hopkins. After officers encountered Hopkins, she swung at one of them with a sword that was more than a foot and a half long before fleeing into a residence, police said in a news release.

In 2015, archaeologists working at a cave in southwestern Germany found an enigmatic perforated baton in a cave called Hohle Fels. It was a near-perfect match for an artifact found in 1983 in a cave down the road. Carved from single pieces of mammoth ivory, the Hohle Fels baton—roughly 20 centimeters long, about the length of a large paperback book—had multiple holes with spiraling grooves around the openings. Similar objects have been found elsewhere in Germany and in nearby France, often made from ivory or antler. They date from the last ice age, more than 35,000 years ago, a time...

A British academic projecting “trans theory” onto the past has claimed that the graves of Anglo-Saxon warriors indicate that some among their ranks were transgender. James Davison, a University of Liverpool PhD candidate and tutor of medieval history, has asserted that examining the graves of Anglo-Saxon warriors through the “lens of transness” suggests that there may have been trans warriors 1,500 years ago and that so-called transgender women may have been exalted in their society. “Using approaches from trans studies – which acknowledge the potential for genders beyond a male-female binary in historical cultures – allows researchers to approach these...

Actors don’t need to share the ‘lived experience’ of their characters.The Globe Theatre in London has come under fire for a supposedly controversial casting choice. Last week, it was announced that Michelle Terry, who is also the Globe’s artistic director, would be taking on the titular role in Shakespeare’s Richard III later this summer. Outrage immediately ensued. Because according to identitarian activists, Terry doesn’t have the ‘lived experience’ needed to play the scheming king.Certainly, there are some pretty glaring differences between Michelle Terry and Richard III. For one thing, Terry is a woman and Richard, obviously, was a man. But...

One of the most famous ‘proofs’ of Nessie Credit: Marmaduke Arundel "Duke" Wetherell/Creative Commons The latest sighting of the famously illusive Loch Ness Monster was recorded on January 24, 2024, and the tourist who saw it claims he was most surprised by the colour. Jarod Strong was close to Urquhart Castle on the banks of the loch, near Inverness, Scotland when he says he spotted the mysterious monster. However, although being surprised at the sight of old Nessie, he reveals the thing that shocked him most was that it wasn’t green! Jarod said: “I was near the castle with my...

Customers at Home Depot were delighted to discover the home improvement store is now selling a medieval sword similar to one used in a famed 1990s Best Picture winner. "Reclaim your FREEDOM from the tyrannical English king with this authentic William Wallace sword," Home Depot's descri7ption of the product says. The sword is a replica of the one used by Mel Gibson in the 1995 Oscar-winning film, "Braveheart." Fans of the film wasted no time filling the product's Question and Answer section and reviews with jokes and references to the iconic film and other famous movies.

Composers count themselves lucky when musicians continue to perform their music after their death. But the American avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992, never would have guessed that a single performance of his music would begin in 2001 and still be playing. In fact, it isn’t due to conclude for another 616 years. In a marathon performance like this, any little change becomes big news. On Feb. 5, 2011, for instance, one of the first three notes stopped sounding – after being sustained for eight years. On Feb. 5, 2023, another note is going to begin playing –...

An engraving on an almost 2,000-year-old knife believed to be the oldest runes ever found in Denmark has been discovered by archaeologists.The runic inscription – the alphabet of Denmark's earliest written language – was etched into an 8cm iron knife found in a grave below an urn near the city of Odense on the island of Funen. The five characters, each about 0.5cm tall, followed by three grooves, spell out hirila, which means "little sword" in Old Norse.Along with an inscribed bone comb found nearby in 1865, they are the oldest runes ever found in Denmark. Jakob Bonde, the city's...

Excavations in Kyburg in the canton of Zürich, northeastern Switzerland have discovered a 14th-century fully preserved gauntlet of armor in exceptional condition.Only five 14th-century gauntlets have been discovered in Switzerland thus far, according to the Zurich cantonal infrastructure department on Tuesday. However, their state of preservation is nowhere near that of the glove discovered in Kyburg. All the iron parts of this one have been found, and some of the fingers are even completely free of corrosion and look as good as new.The metal parts of the glove were originally riveted to a leather glove. The 25 pieces were also...

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of...

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem sits atop the site of the Second Temple, the central place for Jewish worship before its destruction during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. One wonders if any of the people braying about the alleged “settler colonialism” of Israel ever wonder how Al-Aqsa got there. Did the Jews voluntarily erect a version of it in an eighth-century homage to multiculturalism? If not, how did the Muslims who built it come to be in Jerusalem in the first place? These are rhetorical questions, of course. The caliphate besieged Jerusalem...

Archaeologists in Sweden have discovered the medieval burial of an extremely tall man who was buried with a long sword — one that was nearly two-thirds of his height — and may have been a nobleman who supported the region's ill-fated union with Denmark and Norway.The sword, which is over 4 feet (1.3 meters) long, seems to have been inlaid with a different metal to form small Christian crosses, excavation leader Johan Klange, an archaeologist with the Halland Cultural Environment, an agency of the local government, told Live Science.Even taller than the sword was the man in the grave. Klange...

The dreaded drought through the country of Spain has caused many disastrous effects throughout the nation. However, one small positive that has come from the crisis, is the reemergence of a sunken 11th century church in the Spanish village of Sant Roma de Sau. Due to extremely low levels of water, the historical building has recently emerged from the waters of a reservoir. New year, new Sunday opening for Costa del Sol shops What are being labelled as ‘drought tourists’ are now visiting from far and wide to see the 11th-century church, which was submerged 60 years ago. The church...

Filled with wonders, Marco Polo's tales are the first European account of the Silk Road. But, 700 years after the famed Venetian merchant and explorer's death, can they be trusted? Can a man who claimed to have seen a unicorn in the Indonesian island of Sumatra be trusted? This and other similarly valid questions have cast doubt on the truthfulness of Marco Polo since the 14th Century, when his book The Travels of Marco Polo became a bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages, hand-copied in countless manuscripts and available at any lavish court in Europe. Polo's tales are...

The ornaments contain the earliest known depiction of a Göktürk "khagan," who probably lived in the sixth century.Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered two gold ornaments in a 1,500-year-old tomb that feature the earliest known depictions of the great khan, or "khagan," of the Göktürks — a nomadic confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples who occupied the region for around three centuries, according to an archaeologist who excavated the site...The finds are from the Eleke Sazy site near Kazakhstan's remote eastern borders with China, Mongolia and Russian Siberia, where Samashev and his colleagues have worked since 2016.The sixth-century Göktürk tomb holds the remains...