Welcome to this week's Link Dump!
Happy Friday the 13th!
The languages of ancient humans.
Dodo birds actually tasted pretty good. Unfortunately for them.
An ancient coin that tells of a massive slave rebellion.
The long war against the Barbary pirates.
Traces of a mysterious ancient religion.
An extinct marsupial turns up alive and well.
The miniatures that served as Tudor love tokens.
In which we learn that "adult" has nothing to do with "adultery."
Ancient humans loved elongated skulls.
Yet another artifact that rewrites human history.
The mystery of the man in the reservoir.
How people woke up before alarm clocks came along.
A murder mystery in Medford.
If you live in Florida, keep your eyes peeled for giant scorpions.
The fire that destroyed the SS City of Montreal.
Syphilis has been around for a very long time.
Sir John Vanbrugh and his castle.
In which undertakers Tell All.
Da Vinci and the hidden crotch detail.
The Kentucky county that celebrates the time it got showered with meat.
How France came to legalize posthumous marriages.
The possibility that Amelia Earhart wound up as crab food.
That's all for this week! See you on Monday, when we'll look at a death that was part suicide, part murder. In the meantime, here's some Vivaldi.
Thanks for the latest batch of weird and wonderful.
ReplyDeleteBy coincidence I am aware of the Zanj Revolt (but that’s primarily because they are one of the more obscure armies that wargamers - daft people, like me, who fight battles on the tabletop with toy soldiers - are interested in.
Cheers,
Geoff
I've always liked Vanbrugh, one of those genius amateurs who turns out to be very good in a field to the side of his profession or trade. The Zanj rebellion sounds very interesting, but if there is so little evidence of it, how do we know so much about it? Hurrah for the possum once thought extinct! And the theory about Earhart dying on an island an being eaten by crabs has to be the most believed theory with absolutely no evidence for it. And why is it thought that she survived and Noonan died, when the bones that were found were believed to be from a male? And "a fragment of a skull" found is thought to be from a woman?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the vast, vast majority of information about the Zanj revolt is in Arabic. There is information out there is English, but that was obviously reliant on translation and frequently in obscure magazines/journals.
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