Invading armies have a long and sordid history of destroying monuments of conquered civilizations. The Spanish razed Aztec and other indigenous temples in the Americas so that Catholic cathedrals could be erected in their place. And in the 2010s, both Taliban and Islamic State soldiers have specifi...
People have worn jewelry for as long as civilization has existed and mostly used it as a symbol of royalty, wealth, and status. Nowadays, jewelry is much more accessible and is worn by almost everybody. During the Victorian Era, enormous changes happened in the jewelry indus...
Since humankind has existed, so too has their fascination with the stars. Long beforeancient people used the stars and planetsto help them track the best harvesting times, the night sky provided a cosmic canvas onto which humanity projected their own mythology. Ancient Greeks are among the first...
“I think you can’t win,” says Heller. “Either you try to extinguish it—and if that’s the case, you’ve got to brainwash an awful lot of people—or you let it continue, and itwillbrainwash a lot of people. As long as it captures people’s imag...
Deadly outbreaks have plagued societies for centuries. But they can lead to medical breakthroughs—if we learn the right lessons from them.
Long celebrated in Mexico, the Day of the Dead has been increasing in popularity the U.S. in the last few years. Some attribute this partly to the success of the 2017 Disney film "Coco," which featured the holiday. "Sugar skulls are more popular in 2019 than in any other time," Rios...
While the term may be less than a century old, many of the ideas behind permaculture have been around for thousands of years. Ancient civilizations practiced such growing strategies as planting multiple crops, forest farming, crop rotation and composting long before environmentalism came into being....
all the societies that have ever existed have been multicultural. Multiculturalism is simply the human condition, not to be questioned any more than the air we breathe. Many advocates of this view are not multiculturalists per se but old-fashioned progressives (or, to put it less politely, in...
However, the sheer scale of the pyramids have left many puzzled at how they could have even been built. This has led to outlandish misconceptions and conspiracy theories, ranging from aliens to long-lost civilizations. But how were the pyramids built? It turns out, science and history has a...
Voyager 1 and 2 carry coded messages to potential alien civilizations. They have already taught scientists a great deal about the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the solar system. But none of this is even what they were designed for. The Voyager spacecrafts were built to fly past the oute...