History

When Amelia Earhart stepped into the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra in June 1937, her sights were set on an accomplishment no woman had ever made—a female-piloted solo flight around the globe. Amelia Earhart at age six months old (left) and at seven-years-old (right). Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas and grew up to defy gender norms of the time. Newspaper reporters crowded around the plane, documenting everything from her blue eyes to her bobbed hair to her pre-flight banter about her airplane’s fuel capacity and speed. Though many of...

As the water poured in, the western Mediterranean began refilling at a tremendous rate; Micallef estimates the water flowed at a rate of somewhere between 68 and 100 million cubic meters per second, filling the sea by as much as ten meters, or nearly 33 feet, each day. The weight of the rising waters pressed down on the Earth’s crust, making it slide across the molten mantle underneath. This, says , a Geophysicist at CSIC Barcelona and a pioneer on research into the Zanclean megaflood, would have triggered earthquakes that...

The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is one of the most remote places on earth—more than 500 miles north of Europe, and about as far from the North Pole, it was entirely uninhabited by humans until the late 19th century, aside for a few early attempts by whalers to overwinter that mostly ended in disaster. The original name for this archipelago was “Spitsbergen,” translated from Dutch it means simply “pointy mountains,” and from the distance of a ship at sea, that’s all one sees here: jagged, snow-capped mountains spaced apart by...

In 2019, while excavating the necropolis of Qubbet el Hawa, across the Nile from Aswan in southern Egypt, Belgian and Spanish archaeologists unearthed a trove of mummified crocodiles: five almost complete skeletons, plus five heads. Although crocodiles are often found in Egyptian tombs, it is rare to discover 10. The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, shed light on the embalming technique used and even how the animals might have died. Archaeologists study one of the best preserved crocodile specimens. Egyptians saw crocodiles as intermediaries between humans and Sobek,...

Virginia Allen was just 16 years old when she joined the nursing staff at Sea View Hospital in New York City, a facility that opened specifically to address the millions dying of tuberculosis, also called “consumption”. At the time, the highly contagious illness was poorly understood and many white healthcare workers refused to help. Allen was one of the thousands of Black nurses— the “Black Angels”—who stepped up, joining her aunt Edna Sutton Ballard at the Staten Island hospital. It was a “rich work experience [and] when I look back...

Dead puppies, potential human sacrifices and a painted dog penis bone buried in a ritual deposit in an ancient quarry shaft in southern England are revealing what fertility rituals may have looked like in the early decades of Roman conquest. “It was filled with an absolutely shocking number of bones,” says Ellen Green, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading. “You couldn’t move around in there without stepping on something.” Green describes the find in a recent issue of the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. The hole full of bones—the largest...