Search
Ancient History
Mesopotamian beer was not flavored with hops, and it was probably on the thick, porridgey side.
Bloodcurdling war cries, shrieking elephants, and whistling arrows all made soldiers flee in terror.
What's the point of all that money?
More than mindless bloodshed, the gladiatorial games were organized sports. Gladiators were treated as world-class athletes, receiving superior diets and medical care.
Commodus lived the anti-Stoic life, pursuing lust, narcissism, and self-indulgence.
Some artifacts drown in shipwrecks, others are taken by the tide. Many others will vanish as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.
Rock art in northern Australia depicts marsupial lions, giant kangaroos, and other megafauna that populated the Land Down Under long ago.
The 557-million-year-old specimen challenges the theory that animal body plans were laid out in the Cambrian explosion.
Human beings are descendants of these early tetrapods – at least those who made a new life on land.
Horses pranced around the western hemisphere until they went extinct in the late Holocene. They were reintroduced by European colonists — though where, when, and how has remained unclear.
Rare and costly paints have shaped art history in unforeseen ways. Mummy brown caused one artist to bury his paint.
Long before Christopher and Magellan, ancient explorers voyaged into the unknown and brought home extraordinary tales.
"The surface is no longer a record of every impact the moon has ever had, because at some point, impacts were erasing previous impacts."
Using data collected from ancient civilizations across the world, researchers identified the most significant factors in human development. War came out on top.
Mammals have a history stretching back 325 million years. To study that ancient history is to know our own origins.
Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.
Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa.
The architecture and infrastructure found may well have required the greatest amount of skilled labor of any construction from the same time period in the entire continent.
The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Europe.
Unlike other world rulers, Genghis Khan was laid to rest not inside an elaborate mausoleum but an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe.
Before gunpowder was introduced to the West, medieval Arabs devised grenades using crockery.
In the Canaan religion, Yahweh was a lesser god, who was assigned the land of Israel. Here's how he became "God Almighty."
Some of the coastal areas were not repopulated for millennia afterward, showing that there was a long-lasting memory of this tragic event.
The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn't kill them.
An elaborate device called the Mechanical Turk defeated Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte at chess. Edgar Allan Poe revealed the hoax.
The strangest thing about trying to predict the future is that our only clues lie in the past.
Experimental archaeology is the practice of recreating past events using knowledge and tools available at the time. Sometimes, it involves elephants.
OmnesViae is a modern route planner based on the roads of the Roman Empire.
Human sacrifice appears to be as old as humanity itself. Still, experts disagree on how and where the practice first originated.