Prehistoric

Roughly 18,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in New Guinea loved nothing more than a good fried egg and a lump of roasted bird meat. To enjoy these treats more easily, they turned to bird breeding. What is surprising is that they bred one of the deadliest birds on the planet: the deadly cassowary.

We’ve all created associations between certain foods and ingredients with particular places and cultures. But the history of the origin of foods is complicated and ascertained only thanks to serious academic and scientific study. Read on to discover the lesser-known origins of popular foods.

One of the most intriguing and perplexing legends of the Australian Aboriginal people is that of the Wandjinas, the supreme spirit beings and creators of the land and people. The land of the Wandjina is a vast area of about 77,220 square miles in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia. This region has continuously been important for indigenous culture since at least 60,000 years ago, and probably much longer.

A perplexing question that often arises is: why did our ancestors undertake chthonic journeys into the deepest bowels of the earth to express themselves through art against the uneven walls of the darkest caves? Why not paint rock art in more accessible locations?

What do you think about when you are about to visit the Great Pyramid, one of the most iconic ancient monuments in the world? The answer, as you traverse the uneven bedrock towards its elevated location, is its extraordinary size. However big you imagined it to be, it is never enough to fully appreciate its enormous size.

Doomsday prophecies are as old as recorded time.  For as long as humans have existed, there has been a fear of an apocalypse or ‘end of times’, when the gods wish vengeance upon their people, when humans pay for the sins of their forefathers, and when the demons of the world rise up and devour all that is good.  Prophecies of the end of times stem from the mythologies of civilizations past: the Norse story of Ragnarök, the tale of Noah and the Flood, and the Bib

Aeschylus, widely regarded as the “Father of Tragedy,” was one of the first of classical Athens’ great dramatists. He raised the emerging art of tragedy to new heights of poetry and theatrical power. The legendary playwright wrote more than 90 plays and won with half of them at Athenian festivals of Greek drama. For all his skills in theater, however, he’s trending within the circles of modern pop culture thanks to his very bizarre death.

In 1897, archaeologists uncovered a stunning artifact on a private estate at L'Alcúdia in Valencia, Spain. This find was a statue – a polychrome bust of a woman’s head. Believed to date back to the 4th Century BC, the bust features a woman wearing an elaborate headdress. Now seen as one of Spain’s most famous icons, the bust is known as the Lady of Elche.

It is probably not possible to tell when humans first began to wonder about the stars, the sun, and the moon or tried to understand their motion, though there is evidence of a lunar calendar being used by hunter-gatherers during the Upper Paleolithic in Europe around 32,000 BC.

Flores is a pretty island in eastern Indonesia which is home to nearly two million inhabitants. Most significantly, it is the only place on Earth where traces of an ancient hominin species known as Homo floresiensis have ever been found.