The ancient world gave mankind some of its most brilliant thinkers and philosophers. From Socrates and Aristotle to Master Kung-sun Lung, they forever changed the way we looked at the world. Some of them posed thought problems and paradoxical situations that we’re still musing over more than 2,000 years later.

10 The Floating Man

Islamic physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) wrote extensively about the soul and intellect, among other topics. His work formed the basis for European philosophy for centuries after his death in the 11th century. In Sina’s work on the concept of self and self-identity, he posed a question that has become known as The Flying Man or The Floating Man:

A man is created floating in the air or in a substance that completely isolates him from physical feeling. His arms and legs do not touch each other or anything else. His eyes are always closed, it is completely silent, and he receives no sensory input whatsoever. Does he still recognize his existence and the concept of the self without being aware of the existence of a physical form? What does that mean for the idea of an independent, immortal soul?

9 Meno’s Paradox

Meno’s Paradox is named for a student of Socrates. Socrates was famous for his exploration into the ideas of ignorance and inquiry, but it was Meno who developed the paradox that defined the problem between the two.

The paradox states that nothing can be learned by asking questions. If a person already knows the answer, then there’s no point in asking. If they don’t know the answer or what they’re looking for, then there’s no point in asking because they wouldn’t be able to recognize a correct answer or even the information they’re searching for. The very nature of inquiry makes it pointless and unnecessary, if not outright impossible.

The paradox falls apart when you consider most people exist in varying states of partial ignorance and know just enough information to be guided in the right direction, e.g. looking up words in a dictionary.

8 The Cosmic Edge

In the fifth century BC, philosopher and soldier Archytas posed a seemingly simple question. He asked, “What happens to a spear when it is hurled across the outer boundary of the universe? Does the spear rebound, or vanish from this world?”

Later philosophers, including Lucretius the Epicurean, would cite Archytas’s question as they formulated their own arguments for an endless, infinite universe. Lucretius states that there could only be two possible answers—an infinite universe or some sort of boundary. Others have weighed in on the riddle, saying that as unthinkable as an infinite universe is, it is more unthinkable to imagine standing on the edge of it and reaching into nonexistence.

Since it made no sense for the spear to rebound off the edge of the cosmos, there must be no edge.

7 The Chicken Or The Egg?

A riddle that has stumped philosophers and scientists for centuries, the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first was recorded by the Greek historian Mestrius Plutarchus. When he devoted an entire section to the question in his book of essays, it was already a well-known dilemma, and he posed the idea that it was far from being a question simply about eggs and chickens. The dilemma could be put to all of creation.

Aristotle took a very practical approach to trying to determine the answer. Embryology had been studied for centuries by that point, but he examined chicken eggs in various stages of development to help map the growth of embryos. In the end, he decided that neither came first, as the egg couldn’t exist without the chicken, and the chicken couldn’t exist without the egg.

6 The Plank Of Carneades

Carneades was a Greek scholar born in Cyrene around 214 BC. By the time he was representing the interests of Athens in Rome, he was also writing extensively on the ideas of justice. He is the one usually credited with developing the plank riddle (although it might have originally been formulated by one of his contemporaries).

The scenario describes two shipwrecked men, lost at sea. The only thing left of their ship is a single wooden plank. They both swim for it, knowing it is their only chance for survival. In one version, they reach the plank at the same time. One man shoves the other away and saves himself. In the other version, one man is on the plank, while the other pushes him off and drowns him to save himself.

Either way, the person on the plank is ultimately rescued. Can he be tried for taking another human life to save his own, or is necessity a valid excuse?

5 Chrysippus’s Paradox

The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus wrote extensively on the existence of virtues and characteristics in a single body to make up the self. He posed the bizarre case of Dion and Theon to illustrate the idea of what constitutes the self:

Take a person, the puzzle says, and name him Dion. Take the same person and assign the name Theon to every part of him save one foot. Cut the foot off to make them identical. Since two people cannot inhabit the same space at the same time, one of them must die with the removal of the foot. Chrysippus argues that Theon dies while Dion lives, because Theon cannot lose something he never had and ceases to exist.

Although the Stoic school generally agreed with this analysis, the Academic Philo argued that it was Theon who would survive. His argument was that since Theon would have nothing to lose, he would escape the incident unharmed, and Dion would perish.

4 The Debtor’s Paradox

In the fifth century BC, Epicharmus of Syracuse was penning some of the early Greek comedies. In one, he posed a scene that was meant to be humorous but ultimately spawned an entire debate about the nature of the self:

A character has borrowed money from another and cannot pay him back. The borrower asks the lender if he has a number of pebbles and adds another rock or takes one away, if he has the same number. When the lender says, “No,” the borrower states that since mankind is always growing and changing, he is no longer the same person who borrowed money, and he doesn’t have to repay it.

The story continues with the lender giving the borrower a good thrashing and then claiming that he is no longer the same person who beat up the borrower and shouldn’t be held responsible.

Metaphysics still grapples with the relationship between our physical forms, intrinsic change, and whether or not we can ever be considered a completely new or different person.

3 A White Horse Is Not A Horse

This not-so-straightforward observation comes from Chinese philosopher Master Kung-sun Lung and his Treatise on the White Horse, written around 250 BC. The argument simply states that a white horse is not a horse, and it has spawned countless arguments on the nature of language and logic.

People have been debating the logic of the statement for more than 2,000 years, but one of the basic arguments is that since “horse” defines the shape of the beast and “white” refers to a color, “horse” is color-neutra,l and it cannot be the same as a “white horse.” No one would say that a “white horse” and a “yellow horse” are the same, and since “horse” and “white horse” do not always refer to the exact same things, they are not equal.

Therefore, a white horse is not a horse.

2 The Paradox Of A Grain Of Millet

Zeno of Elea was a philosopher from fifth-century BC Greece, and he was known for his paradoxes. He developed the paradox of the grain of millet but never gave his own thoughts on it, simply leaving the observation out there for the rest of the world to argue about:

When a bushel of millet falls, it very clearly makes a sound. But when a single grain of millet falls, there is no sound. How can a bushel of millet make a sound, when none of its individual parts do?

The paradox has been interpreted in a couple of different ways. One simply states that there’s nothing wrong with parts having different properties from the whole, while another states that the single grain does make a sound; we just can’t hear it. With this interpretation, it becomes a lesson in how we shouldn’t necessarily trust our own hearing.

1 Epicurean Paradox

Epicureanism is a school of thought that teaches the pursuit of tranquility and freedom from pain and discomfort, but its foremost thinkers delved into the problems they saw with religion, too. Epicurus and his students depicted their idea of God (or gods) as having a sort of hands-off stance on human affairs, and they also developed the Epicurean Paradox.

The paradox is also known as the problem of evil, and it says that if God is all-powerful, He should be able to defeat all evil in the world. Since evil exists in the world, He either has chosen not to defeat it or cannot defeat it. That either makes God not as powerful as claimed or a malevolent being that is absolutely fine with the presence of evil in the world.

For Epicurus, the only rational explanation is that there is no such thing as an all-powerful, ever-present, benevolent God.

Ancient Sparta was located in a region known as Laconia in the southeastern part of the Peloponnese. Even today, the allure of that prominent Greek city-state still catches our interest and imagination. The simplicity of their way of life, their political stability, their strict education system, and the “production” of the finest Greek warriors were some of the reasons why ancient Sparta was admired by many other Greek cities.

10 Brevity And Directness

In addition to their reputation as fine warriors, the Spartans were also known for the brevity and directness of their speech.

Shortly before Philip of Macedon (Alexander’s father) invaded Laconia, he wrote a letter to the Spartans saying, “If I invade Laconia, I will drive you out.” The Spartans wrote a one-word letter back to Philip saying, “If.” (Plutarch, On Talkativeness: 511a). Philip eventually entered Laconia and sent another letter to the Spartans asking whether they would receive him as a friend or a foe. The Spartans replied, “Neither.” (Plutarch, “Sayings of the Spartans”: 233e).

Plutarch wrote that Spartans do not say much, but what they say grabs the listener’s attention and they go straight to business (“Life of Lycurgus”: 19). A lost Greek comedy (we know some fragments of it due to the latter quotations) had a line saying, “Smaller than a letter sent from Sparta.”

9 Suppression Of Corruption And Greed

The pursuit of material wealth and mostly any other activity outside of a military career was discouraged by Spartan law. Iron was the only metal allowed for coinage; gold and silver were forbidden. According to Plutarch (“Life of Lycurgus”: 9), Spartans had their coins made of iron. Therefore, a small value required a great weight and volume of coins.

Transporting a significant amount of value in coins required the use of a team of oxen, and storing it needed a large room. This made bribery and stealing difficult in Sparta. Wealth was not easy to enjoy and almost impossible to hide.

8 Suppression Of Laziness

Spartan warriors had to be strong and fit. This was particularly important for young men who were still in the process of becoming fully developed warriors. Aelian (Miscellaneous History: 14.7) recorded that Spartan law required young men to stand naked in public so that their bodies could be inspected.

This was a routine check performed every 10 days, and they were expected to display a healthy and strong physique. Those who had flaccid limbs, excessive body fat, or both were beaten and censured.

7 Cowardice

Xenophon (Constitution of Sparta: 9.4) provides a detailed list of the disastrous consequences that a Spartan soldier could face if he was perceived as a coward.

According to this list, everyone would be ashamed to share a meal with a coward and to wrestle with him in the gymnasium. He would never be picked when choosing teammates for ball games, he had to make way for others in the street, he had to give his seat to younger men, he would not be able to find a woman to marry, and he could be beaten in case he behaved in a manner that would lead others to believe that he was not a coward.

During the famous last stand against the Persians in Thermopylae, a Spartan soldier named Aristodemus was suffering from a disease in the eyes and was too ill to fight. After returning to Sparta, he was known as “the coward Aristodemus.” One year later, Aristodemus fought and died bravely in the Battle of Plataea and regained his honor.

Plutarch added another form of punishment for cowardice. He wrote that cowards had to “go around unkempt, wearing cloaks with patches of dyed cloth, and with one side of their beard shaved.” (“Life of Agesilaus”: 30).

6 Marriage

Although Spartan law permitted anyone over age 20 to get married, men had the obligation of living in military housing until age 30. As a result, young married couples were forced to live their marriage as a sort of illegal and secret affair. Many couples would even have children years before they lived under the same roof.

Even during their wedding night, a newly married Spartan couple had to conduct themselves as if they were doing something wrong. A Spartan bride was dressed like a man and left alone on a couch in a dark bedroom. Her husband had to sneak into the room in secret, making sure that nobody noticed his presence.

“This would go on for a long time, and some Spartans even became fathers before seeing their wives in the daylight.” (Plutarch, “Life of Lycurgus”: 15).

5 Helots

The Spartans had slaves, known as “helots,” who were occupied as farmers, as house servants, and in most activities that would distract the free Spartan citizens from their military duties. The helots were culturally Greek, reduced to servitude by the Spartans, and with new conquests, their number increased. During the late eighth century and after a long war, the Spartans annexed Messenia (southwest of the Peloponnese) and its inhabitants were reduced to slavery and turned into helots.

Plato (Critias, fragment 37) claimed that Spartans had special locks on their doors because they had little trust of the helots. It is also known that the Spartans had a secret police, the Krypteia, who were responsible for keeping the helots in check. According to Plutarch (“Life of Lycurgus”: 28), the Krypteia would kill any helot found in the countryside during the night, and they would kill any helot who looked strong and fit during the day.

4 Spartan Kings

Sparta had two kings belonging to different royal dynasties. Although their power was limited, one of them would have the duty of commanding the army in time of war. Spartan kings were descendants of the god Heracles. At least, this is what the official genealogy of the Spartan kings claimed.

The existence of two ruling houses was in direct contradiction with the idea of a common ancestry, which led to an imaginative explanation: During the fifth generation after Heracles, twin sons, Agis and Eurypon, had been born to the king. This was the mythical origin of the ruling families’ names, the Agiads and the Eurypontids.

Herodotus offers a complete genealogical list for the ancestry of Leonidas and Leotychidas, the two Spartan kings around the time of the Persian Wars. (Histories: 7.204.480 for Leonidas and 8.131.2 for Leotychidas).

3 The Ephors

The ephors were a branch of Spartan government with no equivalent in the rest of the Greek world. They were elected annually from the pool of male citizens. Their role was to balance and complement the role of the king. They were the supreme civil court and had criminal jurisdiction over the king.

The kings swore to uphold the Spartan constitution, and the ephors swore to uphold the king as long as he kept his oath. When a king went to war, two of the ephors would join him to supervise his actions. During the absence of a king, some of his responsibilities would be delegated to the ephors.

2 Spartan Women

The role of women in Sparta was different than in the rest of Greece. In general, they had a lot more freedom. They were not secluded like in many other Greek cities, and girls were expected to endure the same physical training as boys.

They also had gymnastics side by side with boys, all naked. They were trained in casting the dart, running, wrestling, and throwing the bar, among other skills. All this was supposed to make women stronger, more flexible, and better equipped to endure the pain of bearing children.

Spartan women had a reputation among other Greeks of being chaste. This admiration coexisted with the fact that if a married woman was childless, the state could order her to see if another man could do a better job in begetting children. Usually, women would accept this initiative. Spartan law was strict about encouraging new children, and there was little or no room for maneuvering in this regard.

1 Spartan Army

Spartan citizens were expected to become professional soldiers, a process that began by removing young kids from their homes at age seven. The young Spartans were separated into age groups and lived in military housing.

From age seven, Spartans had to endure severe athletic and military training. Plutarch (“Spartan Customs”: 239d) said that Spartans boys were flogged with whips for an entire day on the altar of Artemis and they had to tolerate it, competing with each other to see who was capable of resisting the highest number of strokes.

Their training became even more intense at age 20. By this time, they joined common mess halls. Their skills in the battlefield allowed them to be capable of outmaneuvering any other Greek army. It was no coincidence that Sparta had no need for fortifications during most of its history.

Working with the limited scientific knowledge they had, the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations came up with a number of theories about the human body. While some were correct, most were not. As a matter of fact, some doctors, philosophers, and thinkers got it hilariously wrong.

10 Food Was Changed Into Blood By The Liver
Originator: Galen

Perhaps the greatest Roman (though, he was of Greek ethnicity) doctor ever, Galen published a vast number of writings on the human body and proposed many correct theories. One of the incorrect ones that he believed was that food was digested by the stomach and taken to the liver, where it was turned into blood. The biggest reason for many of Galen’s errors was that he’d never dissected a human body; in his time, it was outlawed by the Roman Empire. His theories were widely followed—practically blindly—until the 16th century, when Flemish doctor Andreas Vesalius began to question Galen’s findings.

9 Lambs Grew From Trees
Originator: Megasthenes

Megasthenes was a Greek explorer who returned from a trip he took to India and wrote a book about his travels. He referred to cotton plants that he saw as “trees on which grew wool,” which led to the misconception that lambs grew on trees. From that incorrect assumption, a number of other ancient thinkers, including Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder, mentioned “wool-bearing trees” in their writings, perpetuating the myth. As late as the 18th or 19th centuries, this was still a commonly believed theory, with books published on the subject and a number of expeditions undertaken in search of the mythical plant.

8 Light Came From The Eye
Originator: Plato

Plato, one of the greatest Greek philosophers, contributed greatly to medical knowledge—erroneously in a number of cases. Perhaps his worst error was the idea that “a stream of light or fire” emanated from the eye, rebounded off of an object, and combined with sunlight, allowing it to be seen by the eye. An object’s color was said to be “flame particles” that were let off its body. This was a commonly held notion until the 11th century, when Persian scientist Ibn al-Haytham developed his theory that the eye was merely an optical instrument in his writing The Book of Optics.

7 Veins Carried Blood, Arteries Carried Air
Originator: Praxagoras

An ancient Greek physician whose writings have been lost to humanity, Praxagoras is perhaps best known for being the first to realize that veins and arteries are different. However, he believed that air traveled through the arteries (probably due to the fact that blood tends to leave the arteries upon death and accumulates in the veins). Praxagoras explained away bleeding by saying the arteries attracted blood from the neighboring tissue when exposed to air. This theory was widely believed for hundreds of years.

6 Sleep Occurs When Blood Flows Away From The Surface
Originator: Alcmaeon

Another ancient Greek philosopher and doctor, Alcmaeon of Croton was the holder of a number of medical firsts, including the idea that the brain was the seat of understanding, rather than the heart. He also theorized that sensory organs are attached to the brain. However, he wasn’t always correct. He believed that sleep came to humans when their blood flowed from the surface of their bodies to the blood vessels farther in. Alcmaeon also believed that death occurred if all of the blood went deep into the body.

5 The Brain Was Just A Cooling Device
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle believed the heart was the center of knowledge and the source of the sensations in the human body, rather than the brain, and he had an interesting theory about the brain. He felt that the brain was merely a cooling organ for the heart and an area for “spirit” to pool. Even though earlier Greeks, including Alcmaeon and Plato, had put forth a neuro-centric model of the human body, Aristotle ridiculed them for their “fallacious” views. In addition, he also thought women’s brains were smaller than men’s, another of his errors that persisted for a number of years.

4 Hemorrhoids Could Be Cured In Weird Ways
Originator: Pliny The Elder

Pliny the Elder was one of the greatest Roman authors and published Naturalis Historia, one of the earliest examples of an encyclopedia. Apparently, hemorrhoids were quite the problem for the ancient Romans, because there were a number of cures. Using an onion as a suppository was supposed to help, and eating garlic with wine but vomiting it back up was said to be beneficial to hemorrhoid sufferers as well. Using a fresh root of rosemary and rubbing it on the anus was also very effective (it also helped if you had a prolapsed rectum). Perhaps the strangest cure was a cream made from the lard of a pig and the rust of a chariot’s wheels.

3 Light Traveled Through The Ether
Originator: Aristotle

While Aristotle influenced civilization for thousands of years, it doesn’t give him a pass on some of his wilder theories. Chief among them was his idea that the entire universe was filled with an unknown substance called “the ether.” Aristotle proposed the theory because he believed light would be unable to move through an empty universe. Like many of his ideas, this one persisted, and the best and brightest of the scientific community failed to contradict it. It was widely believed until 1910, when Albert Einstein proved light didn’t need the ether with his theory of special relativity.

2 The Testicles Determined A Person’s Voice
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle certainly had his fair share of incorrect theories. Not the least of these was that the testicles were a key factor in determining a person’s vocal pitch. Aristotle’s reasoning was that a boy’s voice tended to deepen during puberty, when his testicles dropped (a lot of this theory was dependent on his observations in animals as well). In addition, he noticed that men who were castrated before puberty maintained their “ladylike” voice, as well as a number of other traits. Obviously, we now know the larynx and the mucus membrane within it control the voice’s pitch.

1 The Womb Roamed Around A Woman’s Body
Originator: Hippocrates

Recognized as the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates had a number of incorrect theories, most notably his theory of humorism, which stated that the human body was made up of four elements that caused illnesses when out of balance. However, his craziest theory was the idea of a “wandering womb.” Hippocrates believed that a woman’s body craved warmth and moisture, so they needed to get laid often. If not, their womb would get bored and start to migrate around their body. In addition, an excess of “male activities,” could also cause the womb to wander. Depending on where it finally attached itself, various disorders could result, including hysteria. This was still a widely held theory until the Middle Ages.

Roman families would be both recognizable and unrecognizable today. Their strict social classes and lawful human rights violations will make any rational person glad to be alive in the 21st century. On the other hand, their homelier moments are eternal. Like today, children played similar games, the whole family coddled pets, and they enjoyed the finer things in life.

10Marriage Was A Mere Agreement

Girls married during their early teens while men tied the knot in their mid-twenties. Roman marriages were quick and easy and most didn’t flower from romance but from two agreements. The first would be between the couple’s families, who eyeballed each other to see if the proposed spouse’s wealth and social status were acceptable. If satisfied, a formal betrothal took place where a written agreement was signed and the couple kissed.

Unlike modern times, the wedding day didn’t cement a lawful institution (marriage had no legal power) but showed the couple’s intent to live together. A Roman citizen couldn’t marry his favorite prostitute, cousin, or, for the most part, non-Romans. A divorce was granted when the couple declared their intention to separate before seven witnesses. If a divorce carried the accusation that the wife had been unfaithful, she could never marry again. A guilty husband received no such penalty.

9Feast Or Famine

Social position determined how a family ate. Lower classes mostly had simple fare while the wealthy often used elaborate feasts to showcase their status. Bread featured heavily at both breakfast and lunch. While the lower classes added olives, cheese, and wine, the upper class enjoyed a better variety of meat, feast leftovers, and fresh produce. The very poor sometimes just ate porridge or handouts.

Meals were prepared by the women or slaves of the household, and the children served them. Nobody had forks, so food was consumed using their hands, spoons, and knives. Dinner parties of the Roman rich were legendary for their decadence and delicacies. Lasting hours, guests reclined on dining couches while slaves cleaned up the discarded scraps around them. All classes relished a stomach-churning sauce called garum. Basically the fermented guts of fish, it reeked so bad that it was forbidden to make it within city limits.

8The Insulae And Domus

One’s neighborhood pretty much depended on how high up the totem pole you were. Insulae were apartment buildings, but the kind that would make a modern safety inspector hit the roof. The majority of the Roman population lived in these seven-story-plus buildings. They were ripe for fire, collapse, and even flooding. The upper floors were reserved for the poor who had to pay rent daily or weekly.

Eviction was a constant fear for the families living in a one-room affair with no natural light or bathroom facilities. The first two floors of an insulae were reserved for those who had a better income. They paid rent annually and lived in multiple rooms with windows.

Wealthy Romans either lived in country villas or owned a domus in the city. A domus was a large, comfortable home. They were big enough to include the owner’s business shop, libraries, rooms, a kitchen, pool, and garden.

7Marital Sex

Things in the Roman bedroom weren’t exactly even. While women were expected to produce sons, uphold chastity, and remain loyal to their husbands, married men were allowed to wander. He even had a rule book. It was fine to have extramarital sex with partners of both genders, but it had to be with slaves, prostitutes, or a concubine/mistress. Wives could do nothing about it since it was socially acceptable and even expected from a man.

While undoubtedly there were married couples who used passion as an expression of affection for one another, the general unsympathetic view was that women tied the knot to have children and not to enjoy a great sex life. That was for the husband to savor, and some savored it a little too much—slaves had no rights over their own bodies, so the rape of a slave was not legally recognized.

6Legal Infanticide

Fathers held the power of life or death for a newborn, even without the mother’s input. After birth, the baby was placed at his feet. If the father picked it up, the child remained at home. Otherwise, it was abandoned outside for anyone to pick up—or to die of exposure. Roman infants faced rejection if they were born deformed, a daughter, or if a poor family couldn’t support another child. If the father was suspicious about the kid’s real paternity, he or she could be dumped near a refuge area.

The lucky ones were adopted by childless couples and received the family’s name. The rest risked being sold as slaves or prostitutes or being deliberately maimed by beggars who displayed such children to get more sympathy. If older children displeased their father, he also had the legal backing to sell them as slaves or kill them.

5Leisure For The Family

Downtime was a big part of Roman family life. Usually, starting at noon, the upper crust of society dedicated their day to leisure. Most enjoyable activities were public and shared by rich and poor alike, male and female—watching gladiators disembowel each other, cheering chariot races, or attending the theatre.

Citizens also spent a lot of time at public baths, which wasn’t your average tub and towel affair. A Roman bath typically had a gym, pool, and a health center. Certain locales even offered prostitutes. Children had their own favorite pastimes. Boys preferred to be more active, wrestling, flying kites, or playing war games. Girls occupied themselves with things like dolls and board games. Families also enjoyed just relaxing with each other and their pets.

4Education

Education depended on a child’s social status and gender. Formal education was the privilege of high-born boys, while girls from good families were only allowed to learn how to read and write. Schooling in Latin, reading, writing, and arithmetic were usually the mother’s duty until age seven, when boys received a teacher.

Affluent families had private tutors or educated slaves for this role; otherwise, the boys were sent to private schools. Education for male pupils included physical training to prepare them for military service as well as later assuming a masculine role in society. Country folk or children born of slaves received little to no formal education. To them it was more practical that sons learn their trades from their fathers and little girls learn housekeeping. There were no public schools for disadvantaged children to attend. The closest thing was informal get-togethers that were run and taught by freed slaves.

3Coming Of Age

While daughters crossed the threshold of adulthood almost unnoticed, a special ceremony marked a boy’s transition to manhood. Depending on his mental and physical prowess, a father decided when his son was grown (usually around 14–17).

On the chosen morning, the youth discarded his bulla and childhood toga, and a sacrifice was given. His father then dressed him in the white tunic of a man. If the older man had rank, the tunic reflected this—two wide crimson stripes if he was a senator and slim ones for a knight. The last of the new clothing was the toga virilis or toga libera, worn only by adult males. The father then gathered a large crowd to escort his son to the Forum. Once there, the boy’s name was registered, and he officially became a Roman citizen. After that, the new teenage man could expect an apprenticeship for a year in a profession of his father’s choosing.

2Pets

When it comes to ancient Rome’s animal policies, one can be forgiven if the first image that comes to mind is gory slaughter at the Colosseum. However, private citizens cherished their household pets. Dogs were by far the favorite, but cats were not uncommon. House-snakes were appreciated as ratters, and domesticated birds were also delighted in. Nightingales and green Indian parrots were all the rage because they could mimic human words.

Cranes, herons, swans, quail, geese, and ducks were also kept. While the last three proved very popular, Roman fondness and treatment of peacocks was almost on par with dogs. Some cruelty existed in bird fighting, but it wasn’t a widespread sport. Roman pets were so deeply loved that they were immortalized in art and poetry and even buried with their masters. Other pets included hares (a popular gift exchanged by lovers), goats, deer, apes, and fish.

1Women’s Independence

Ancient Rome wasn’t an easy place to be a woman. Any hopes of being able to vote or of following a career was about as possible as a modern person trying to pluck a diamond out of thin air. Girls were sidelined to a life in the home and childbirth, suffering a philandering husband (if he was so inclined), and having little power in the marriage and no legal claim to her children.

However, because child mortality was so high, the state rewarded Roman wives for giving birth. The prize was perhaps what most women dearly wanted: legal independence. If a free-born woman managed three live births (four for a former slave), she was awarded with independent status as a person. Only by surviving this serial-birthing could a woman hope to escape being a man’s property and finally take control over her own affairs and life.

As ancient civilizations go, the Egyptians are by far one of the more well-known. Their pyramids still stand to this day, and their mummies and sarcophagi pepper our museums, but is there more to them?

It turns out, some aspects of our modern life found their start in Egypt.

10Mathematics

The Egyptians were remarkable at mathematics. The earliest records of geometry come from Egypt, as their geometry specialists were called “arpedonapti.” The arpedonapti used ropes to calculate the area of lands, eventually passing this knowledge to Greece.

Egyptians also worked out efficient ways of performing multiplication and division. While we have various ways to perform such calculations, Egyptians used a more computation-friendly method that involved doubling numbers, a technique we still use in modern-day computing. The above video goes into detail as to how computers and ancient Egyptians come together.

Egyptians also invented basic fractions. Most had 1 on the top (called a “unit fraction”), and more complex fractions (such as “4/7”) had to be represented by adding up several unit fractions.

9Bowling

Egyptians played a game very similar to modern-day bowling.

Archaeologist William Matthews Flinders Petrie found a child’s grave containing crude pins and small marbles and concluded it might have related to bowling, but there was no proof that they were used for such a purpose. More solid evidence can be found in a room near a residential area from the second century. It featured several balls and a lane with a hole in the middle. Some of the balls could fit through the center hole, while others were far too big.

Archaeologists believe it was a competitive game; one person tried to bowl the smaller ball into the hole, while someone on the other side of the lane tried to knock the ball off-course with the larger ones.

8Alphabets

Of course, we don’t use any Egyptian alphabets today, but the idea of a phonetic alphabet (where each symbol represents a sound rather than a whole word) came from Egypt.

Egyptian hieroglyphs used a symbol for each word, but 24 uniliuteral signs were phonetic to pronounce loanwords and foreign words. Due to the complex nature of hieroglyphs, people had to be trained to use them, so Semitic people within Egypt crafted a 22-letter alphabet based on the uniliteral signs. It’s now known as the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. It was wholly phonetic, with each letter used to construct a larger word—like our own alphabet.

It caught on with Egypt’s neighbors, including the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians would make it their own with an alphabet, simply called the Phoenician Alphabet, which spread around the Near East and Greece through trading. This acted as the foundation for alphabets around the world.

7Paper and Writing

While the Egyptians didn’t discover the paper we use today, papyrus was a huge step up from carving words into stone, both in terms of ease of writing and being lighter to carry around. The Egyptians discovered papyrus (and the reed pen, so they could actually write on it) in 3000 BC. Still, it would take until 500 BC for papyrus to catch hold in the Mediterranean and West Asia. Papyrus would become one of Egypt’s best exports; it was very expensive, and the secrets on how it was made were heavily guarded.

Inspired by Egypt’s work, Europe would eventually move on to parchment. China would invent paper in 100 BC using mulberry bark and hemp rags, using a method that would evolve into today’s technology. While Egypt’s grand invention fell out of use, it gave the world the idea of moving away from stone tablets.

6Wigs

The Ancient Egyptians had a little bit of a dilemma. They didn’t like to have a full head of hair under the heat of the Sun, but they also didn’t want to go totally bald due to both the head skin being roasted by the Sun’s rays and for personal fashion reasons. They needed a temporary head of hair that didn’t trap heat as much as normal hair did but still looked good. The answer, of course, was the wig.

Keeping the heat away wasn’t the only reason the Egyptians adopted the wig. It also protected against head lice. As for what the wigs were made from, the rich and influential could afford to wear wigs made from the real thing—hair, either from themselves or someone else.

5Recorded Medicine

People were treating wounds with all kinds of herbs and ground-up animal parts for a long time. Due to their new and convenient writing methods, however, the Egyptians produced some of the oldest logs we’ve found of both medical procedures and medicine recipes. So far, we’ve found nine separate papyrus logs that talk about how the Egyptians performed their medicine.

One of them, the Edwin Smith papyrus, discusses myriad different wounds on each part of the body and their treatments. It’s unique, as it’s the first historical medical description that doesn’t rely on supernatural or magical forces to treat the wounds, making it scientifically sound—at least, as sound as Egyptian science was at the time. If you’d like to read some of their methods yourself, you can read a translation of the Edwin Smith scroll online.

4Surgery

To go with their new-fangled recorded medicine, the Egyptians hold the title for the civilization with the earliest discovered surgical tools. They were found within the Tomb of Qar, known as “the Physician of the palace and keeper of the secrets of the king.” Kept next to Qar’s head were several bronze surgical tools, each of which sported a hole as if intended to be hung up on a hook.

Of course, given how Egyptians were now writing down their methods and procedures, we can also see written logs of surgery. They detail the removal of cysts and tumors, but more major surgeries that are performed today were probably never performed back then. Given how it was in the very early days of human biology study and anesthetics were still very crude, it’s easy to imagine why.

3Calendar

How we divide the day into hours and minutes and the structure and length of the yearly calendar owe much to pioneering developments in ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was run according to three different calendars. The first was a lunar calendar based on 12 lunar months, each of which began on the first day in which the old moon crescent was no longer visible in the East at dawn. This calendar was used for religious festivals.

The second calendar, used for administrative purposes, was based on the observation that there were usually 365 days between the heliacal rising of Serpet. This civil calendar was split into twelve months of 30 days with an additional five epagomenal days attached at the end of the year. These five days became a festival because it was thought to be unlucky to work during that time. A third calendar, which dates back at least to the 4th century BC, was used to match the lunar cycle to the civil year. It was based on 25 civil years, which was approximately equal to 309 lunar months.

2Toothpaste

Methods of keeping the teeth clean of detritus have been around for a while, but the Egyptians invented the first recorded toothpaste specifically created and reported to help oral health. Some Egyptian tombs were even found with toothbrushes within, which consisted of a twig frayed on one end.

Found in papyrus documents, the recipe for an Egyptian-style toothpaste is a drachma (1/100 of an ounce) of rock salt, two drachmas of mint, a drachma of the dried iris flower, and some pepper. A dentist called Heinz Neuman gave this recipe a shot and said that while it made his gums bleed, his mouth definitely felt cleaner afterward.

1Glass

While glass can be found naturally formed around the world, the first proof that people were creating and using glass in crafts can be found back in 3500 BC, in both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, mainly in the form of small glass beads.

The Egyptians would go on to discover an efficient way of making vases, by plunging compacted sand molds into molten glass and rolling the result onto a cooled slab. The earliest Egyptian vases found were dedicated to Pharaoh Thoutmosis III, dating to around 1500 BC. Ancient Egyptians also managed to master the art of making red glass, which was very hard to do due to the glass having to be fired in an environment without oxygen.

Both the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians would spread their methods through trade and conquer, inspiring the Romans to take up the craft.

Inside the world of extinct animals is a special club—species with dangerous looks. To get a meal or avoid becoming one, both predator and prey refined physical traits to interesting effect.

From fangs in whales to herbivores with a taste for meat and carnivores unlike anything seen today, ancient animals were survival specialists. Recent fossils also revealed unknown predators that terrified the prehistoric landscape and solved the mystery of a unique, if not gruesome, shark.

10 Whales That Ate Whales

Egypt’s Wadi Al-Hitan (“Valley of the Whales”) is littered with the bones of extinct whales. In 2010, researchers stumbled upon a skeleton sticking through the sand. It was identified as Basilosaurus isis. This customer grew 15–18 meters (50–60 ft) long and lived 34 million to 38 million years ago.

Although it was a whale, B. isis did not snack on krill or plankton like its modern relatives. The creature was a ferocious predator that preyed on other whales. This specimen, in particular, provided the first clear evidence.

Inside the stomach curled the remains of a calf. The latter belonged to a smaller whale called Dorudon atrox, a species that matured at 5 meters (16 ft) long. Crush marks on the calf’s skull matched the adult whale’s teeth, proving it was a kill and not a dead body the larger animal had scavenged.^[1]

Once again, the dental side of this ancient whale was far removed from any modern species. B. isis had fangs like a wolf and sharp teeth in the back of its mouth.

9 Largest Early Jurassic Predator

Near the Italian village of Saltrio, a quarry produced a special dinosaur in 1996. Years of dynamite blasts inside the quarry did the fossil no favors. In the end, 130 pieces were recovered. Saltriovenator zanellai took nearly 20 years to put together and identify as a new species.

Weighing about a ton, it was the Early Jurassic’s largest-known predator. Although not the biggest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived, Saltriovenator was nevertheless formidable. It prowled on two legs and grew serrated teeth and deadly claws.

The time it lived—around 198 million years ago—was significant because this predated the existence of large meat eaters by a cool 25 million years. The beast, which grew to 7.6 meters (25 ft) long, died as a juvenile.

When it was 24 years old, the hunter somehow ended up on the seabed. The scars left by scavengers also made the fossil unique. Never before had any dinosaur remains been found that had been nibbled on by at least three distinct marine creatures—ancient sharks, urchins, and sea worms.^[2]

8 Meat-Eating Herbivores

Pachycephalosaurus often appears in children’s dinosaur books. Illustrations show the dome-headed dinosaurs knocking their heads together in battle or grazing on plants. These animals were classified as vegetarians even though only partial jaws were found. Strangely, they were always the back part of the jaw, but they had classic herbivore teeth. Pachycephalosaurus undoubtedly enjoyed mashing fruit and rough plants.

In 2018 in Albuquerque, researchers gathered in confusion around the most complete skull ever found. For the first time, the juvenile contained a complete front jaw. It sported very different teeth. Serrated and sharp, the pointy blades reminded experts of carnivore teeth, especially those of T. rex. Notably, Pachycephalosaurus lived during the same time (66 million to 68 million years ago).

Further research might change their classification to opportunistic hunter and omnivore, but the discovery could also solve an enduring mystery. Very often, rocks from this period produce the teeth of small carnivores nobody can find. Pachycephalosaurus might very well be the source.^[3]

7 The Oldest Tyrannosaur

In 2012, an expedition uncovered bone fragments in New Mexico. Found in the Menefee Formation, the skeleton was badly weathered. For this reason, restoration dragged on for years. Once completed, the creature turned out to be an 80-million-year-old type of tyrannosaur.

It was a remarkable find. The new dinosaur predated the other 25 species of tyrannosaurs by millions of years. Dynamoterror dynastes was unusually large for such an early version of the lineage. It eventually became clear that the 9-meter-long (30 ft) carnivore belonged to the same subgroup that included large relatives such as T. rex, which lived around 15 million years later.

Dynamoterror is special for another reason. North America’s dinosaur evolution experienced a strange split around this time. A sea divided the continent, causing the same types of dinosaur to develop differently in the north and south. The new tyrannosaur’s differences from those of similar age could reveal more about these unusual evolutionary pockets.^[4]

6 Madagascar’s Super Crocodile

When a species is missing its early history, paleontologists call it a “ghost lineage.” The notosuchians are one such group. In 2017, a discovery not only suggested that they originated from southern Gondwana (the original supercontinent) but also presented a new notosuchian member.

Found in Madagascar, Razanandrongobe sakalavae resembled a crocodile. The head alone was 1 meter (3.3 ft) long. It had an unfriendly grin. Each tooth measured 15 centimeters (6 in) in length. In fact, they rather resembled those of T. rex, making the croc thing an apex predator of its time.

Researchers puzzled the species together using the new find and pieces rediscovered in museums. The combined data showed that R. sakalavae was perhaps the biggest notosuchian and definitely the oldest. It chased dinosaurs for dinner around 163 million years ago, a date that beat the previous oldest notosuchian by a mind-bending 42 million years.^[5]

5 Destroyer Of Shins

When a dinosaur died 76 million years ago, it was destined to be named after a monster in the Ghostbusters movie (1984). The fictional Zuul was a hellhound with a face like a gargoyle.

In 2014, the fossil reemerged in Montana. It was a previously unknown ankylosaurid—a dinosaur resembling an armored tank with a distinctive tail used like a club. The fossil was so well-preserved that its looks garnered the movie-inspired name Zuul crurivastator.

When it perished, Zuul was buried in river sand. This preserved even the soft tissue covering the armor and flank damage that suggested it argued with its own kind—which, in itself, was nothing to laugh at.

Although they were herbivores, this species came equipped with a tail that could smash the legs of T. rex. Tipped with a bony ball, the tail was adorned with spikes and measured 2 meters (7 ft) long. While its face was responsible for the “Zuul” part, the tail earned the rest of the creature’s name—crurivastator means “destroyer of shins.”^[6]

4 Dinosaurs With Mohawks

Among the most recognizable of dinosaurs, sauropods were giant herbivores with whiplike tails and long necks. Not all sauropods were big enough to use size as a defense.

In 2013, a smaller species was located in Argentina. The fossil belonged to a brand-new species called Bajadasaurus pronuspinax. At merely 9–10 meters (30–33 ft) long, it was tiny in comparison to other sauropods.

When paleontologists found a bony spine, analysis suggested that it was one of several that ran the length of the dinosaur’s neck and back, almost like a Mohawk. They were likely thin, sharp, and very long. In addition, the spikes probably had a layer of keratin that gave them a hornlike appearance.^[7]

Since the bizarre feature vanished with the species 140 million years ago, confirming its purpose would be a difficult task. A plausible theory is that the sauropods developed Mohawks to look bigger and more dangerous than they really were.

3 The Meat Hook Hunter

A pretty cool nightmare once haunted South America. The size of a truck, it ate meat and hunted with talons that resembled 40-centimeter (16 in) meat hooks. Its discovery in 2006 was a festive moment for scientists. Its group, Megaraptoridae, is exceptionally mysterious.

This specimen was also one of the largest of its kind and the last. Unfortunately, it lived in the Late Cretaceous when dinosaurs went extinct. Unearthed in Argentina, Tratayenia rosalesi managed to fill in some details about its species.^[8]

The carnivore measured 9 meters (30 ft) long and had bones with air pockets. This feature exists in a living relative—modern birds. When T. rosalesi lived 95 million to 85 million years ago, it might have been more closely related to T. rex. This could explain the serrated, daggerlike teeth and why T. rosalesi was among the biggest and most lethal hunters of its time.

2 T. rex Made Deadly Turns

When most people think about Tyrannosaurus rex hunting, a large and stomping predator comes to mind. One might not credit this barreling hulk with turns that are precision moves. After all, these creatures weighed around 400 kilograms (880 lb). However, T. rex could intercept swerving prey by turning like a figure skater.

New research in 2018 found that their hip bones and leg muscles were specially adapted to make them the ballerinas from hell. Also, the kids were even deadlier. A juvenile T. rex could twirl faster than its elders, undoubtedly a perk that helped them survive to adulthood.

These dinosaurs lived during the Cretaceous (145 million to 65 million years ago). To see if pivoting was a thing among predators of the time, researchers used cutting-edge techniques to study other species that frightened everything else during the Cretaceous. When all the monsters were made to digitally turn on a single foot, T. rex spun up to three times faster than the rest.^[9]

1 The Scissor Shark

Around 330 million years ago (long before the dinosaurs), there was a shark unlike any other. Edestus was first discovered in the 19th century when fossils showed up in England and the United States.

Ever since, experts have argued about its eating habits—more specifically, why the so-called “scissor shark” had such weird teeth. The teeth of modern sharks grow along upper and lower crescents. Edestus‘s two rows of snappers resembled pinking shears. The feature has never been seen in any species before or since.^[10]

As there was nothing for scientists to go on, debates and theories proliferated until a recent CT scan. The scan inspired a three-dimensional replica of the head which revealed the shark’s horrific chomp. Incredibly, the jaw appeared to work on a double-jointed system that sliced prey apart. As the shark bit, the sawlike teeth of the upper and lower jaws snapped together before the bottom slid backward to amputate a piece.

Many researchers, mainstream and otherwise, believe that we are not the first advanced civilization to have existed on Earth. Furthermore, they postulate that in prehistory, unrecorded history, one or more advanced civilizations just might have existed, thrived, declined, and perished before us.

While this is an outlandish notion for most people, when broken down, it isn’t as crazy as it first seems, not least when you consider what might become of ourselves should a sudden end announce itself without warning. Chances are, should life begin again, nobody would remember that we had even existed. If that’s the case, then, who’s to say that advanced civilizations didn’t exist thousands of years before our own recorded history?

10 Power Stations Would Shut Down Fast

Let’s say that something happened to wipe out the vast majority of human life on planet Earth. Be it a sudden super-contagious virus, a meteorite, a solar flare, a nuclear war, or even (you know it’s coming) an alien invasion, if it was to happen, life would disappear with alacrity.

Seriously, though, many of us don’t realize just how precarious our existence is here on Earth. Let’s say the vast majority of human life is wiped out by any of the hypothetical situations mentioned above; surely there’d be survivors, right? The thing is, where would the power come from? With no one to run them, the power stations, and with them, the world’s electricity supply, would shut down relatively quickly. In fact, many of them would switch into safety mode to avoid any disasters.

However, eventually, with nobody to oversee these procedures, nuclear power plants, their cooling waters having boiled off, would go into meltdown. Chernobyl-type scenarios would unfold all around the planet.^[1] In short, you really wouldn’t want to be around, and if you were, you would want to be completely out of the way somewhere. We’ll talk more about the survivors in entry number five.

9 Man-Made Objects

Most man-made objects, whether comprised of wood, plastic, metal, or anything other than stone (which we will look at later also) will simply disappear, even down to the roads and streets, which will be completely overcome with vegetation within only several decades at the very most.^[2] Just to take that a stage further, within “only” a few centuries, the metal frameworks of the buildings and the bridges around the world will simply rust, break down, and collapse. All that will be left will be the crumpled and piled ruins.

Within only 10,000 years, which is but a snapshot in terms of geological time, just about all that remains will be the stone. And even then, only that which was built purely from stone will survive in any recognizable form (and still might be buried). As mentioned, bridges and buildings will have collapsed due to their rusted and decaying metal parts and will lie in ruins. Over the course of time, much like our ancient sites today, these ruins will be lucky to be pieced together in the future, if ever.

8 Only Stone Will Survive

Is it any wonder that the structures we have left of the ancient world are the buildings, monuments, and statues carved from stone? And make no mistake, there was much, much more than just stonework at one time.

As we have mentioned above, only true stone structures will survive any type of annihilation of humanity for any significant amount of time,^[3] and even then, the remains would then be subject to any future civilizations and explorers stripping such monuments of what they see as valuable and leaving the rest, much like was done with the Egyptian pyramids (and, who knows, maybe the Sphinx) over course of history.

With that in mind, then, how many of our modern structures might survive thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years, into the future? Ironically, it would mostly be the buildings from antiquity that would still survive. And again, with that in mind, how long have such structures really been there, and who did they once belong to?

7 Myths And Legends

Although they are certainly not the same as solid stone monuments by any stretch of the imagination, should we perhaps pay more attention to certain types of myths and legends that persist across many cultures over thousands of years?^[4] For example, was there really a great flood, even if only in the form of several episodes of localized but substantial flooding that just might have wiped out entire communities? Such calamities would have surely seemed like the end of the world to those civilizations that experienced them.

And what about the tales of “the gods”—higher beings with advanced technology that ruled over mankind? Are these really just legends? Or might there be some truth to such stories? Shortly, we will look at the possibility of survivors from such an “end of the world” situation. What if “the gods” of the past were the survivors of an even older advanced civilization? Might that explain the powers (or advanced technology) of the gods? Or the advanced knowledge of the gods? It is certainly an interesting notion.

6 Ancient Egypt

While we have looked in our previous points at what might happen if our civilization was to face a sudden, life-ending disaster in order to prove, at least in theory, that other civilizations very much could have existed before our recorded history, it is also worth looking back at known ancient civilizations. If we look at the ancient Egyptians, for example, it is perfectly obvious, and even accepted by mainstream scholars, that they appear to have begun their civilization already at the height of their power and then went into permanent decline.^[5]

To some researchers, who are very much shunned by most mainstream experts, this suggests that the Egyptians “took over” the remnants of an ancient, “lost” civilization. From these types of theories generally spring the further claims that such ancient structures as the Pyramids of Giza are more likely monuments and buildings of an Atlantean-type society as opposed to the work of the Egyptians themselves.

5 Survivors Would Be Reduced To Cavemen

Now, let’s say that some people have survived our hypothetical modern-world-ending disaster. What would become of them, realistically? For a start, they would very likely not be concerned with searching out technology or things of that nature. Chances are, once the system has gone down, and the power is off, they will be concerned with their survival more than anything else.^[6] They will no longer be on top of the food chain. Without the aid of our modern plethora of technological gadgets and advanced buildings, many remaining humans will be easy picking for hungry wild animals.

Any survivors would be preoccupied with hunting and gathering whatever food they could and finding some kind of shelter. As the generations go on, humanity’s connection to the “old” world would return. By the third and forth generation, chances are all that would be remembered of pre-disaster Earth would be no different than what myths and legends are to us now. In short, life would be starting again, from scratch.

4 Discoveries Of Mysterious Ancient Objects

As a further point of interest, and perhaps evidence, there have been numerous discoveries of ancient objects, apparently the result of intelligent design, dating to far before such objects should have existed. And what’s more, they’ve been found all over the planet. For example, in 1912, in the small town of Wilburton, Oklahoma, two employees at the Municipal Electrical Plant reportedly discovered a particularly oversized piece of coal that they couldn’t fit into the furnace, which they were stocking to keep the plant ticking over.

They would proceed to smash the coal to smaller pieces so that they could toss the remains into the flames. When they did, though, a perfectly formed and recognizable iron pot fell to the floor. It was allegedly examined and found to be authentic. Why was it there, in a piece of coal that was millions of years of old?

Even more bizarre are the strange spheres, made of some very hard substance, purportedly brought up from the mines of South Africa on multiple occasions by miners.^[7] These spheres have bizarre grooves in them and are of obvious purposeful design. What they might be and, more importantly, why they are there is open to debate.

3 Discoveries Of Tools

As well as mysterious objects that may or may not have a use, many very purposeful and obvious tools have been discovered in pieces of rock that, if we accept what science tells us, are millions of years old.

One particularly intriguing case occurred in London, Texas, in 1936, when the head of a hammer was discovered in a piece of rock believed by some to be as old as 400 million years. (Others say only 700 years.) In 1944, a ten-year-old boy, Newton Anderson, would find a handmade bell in a piece of coal. The lump of coal was reportedly 300 million years old.^[8]

Numerous other purported discoveries of strange, seemingly ancient, objects are on record, many of them from the 1800s and before. The book Forbidden Archaeology lists example after example.

2 Advanced Ancient Technology

Many mainstream historians simply do not accept the notion that many of the ancient civilizations, including the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, had, at one point in the distant past, advanced technology.^[9] However, many reasons are put forward for this notion, not least the obviously advanced knowledge of the cosmos and the workings of the universe that so many ancient civilizations possessed. Even the placement of many of their famous structures mirrors the arrangement of the stars and the planets to such an accuracy that such knowledge cannot be denied.

We could also look to such devices as the “Baghdad Battery” or the traces of acids in the passageways of the Giza Pyramid that suggest some kind of generation of electricity. And what of the many sites around the world that reportedly show signs of nuclear explosions in the distant past? A prominent example is Mohenjo-Daro, which some researchers, most notably David Davenport in his book Atomic Destruction 2000 BC, have postulated was the site of intentionally made nuclear weapons being purposefully deployed long ago. This, of course, would suggest, as Davenport agreed, that a highly advanced civilization existed.

1 Historians Have A ‘Myopic’ View

At the end of the day, no matter the interesting, valid, and, to varying degrees, legitimate views and claims on either side of the argument, the sad fact is that for many mainstream historians, much like mainstream scientists, archaeologists, and most other specialties ending in “ist,” the view is generally, in the words of Graham Hancock, “very myopic.”^[10]

The reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, amid the constant jockeying for limited funding, nobody wishes to put their head above the parapets. So, as a result, the “status quo” opinion is maintained. Those who do discover things of interest that go against the established paradigm and then, more to the point, attempt to tell the world about them, face a sudden cutting of their funding and, even worse, the wrath of their contemporaries. Perhaps a good example would be the case of Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who, after discovering ruins in Mexico that suggested civilization in the Americas going back 250,000 years—using accepted, tested methods no less—was suddenly and universally shut out by the “accepted” scientific and archaeological communities.

Mankind’s love of records left behind countless documents. Needless to say, some are so common that the very sight of them makes people regret going to the museum.

Then there are the secret codes and oaths, unique manuscripts, and caves marked with people’s fear. Text-obsessed scholars are talking in dead tongues and admit once again that the ancient Egyptians did some amazing things.

The world of rare words and pictures is a magnetic one. Sometimes, it’s even downright funny.

10 Oldest Near-Death Case

In 1740, a French doctor called Pierre-Jean du Monchaux described a curious case. An unconscious patient had recovered, only to describe a light so pure and white that the man was convinced he had stood with one shoe in Heaven. The case was included in the doctor’s book, Anecdotes de Medecine.

It might have gone unnoticed if not for Phillippe Charlier, who recently riffled through an antique shop. Ironically, he was also a French doctor. He found the book by chance and bought it for less than $1.

When he read about the case, Charlier realized he was looking at the world’s oldest report of a near-death experience. It was a time when people leaned on religion to explain such things, but the ancient physician stayed professional. He suggested a medical reason—too much blood rushing to the brain.

Monchaux’s assessment nearly matched modern explanations. Today, researchers think a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the brain cause the sensations of a near-death experience.^[1]

9 The Mysterious Devourer

In 2017, archaeologists took their shovels to a shrine-like building. The small structure stood at Zincirli in Turkey and soon yielded a pot. The stone vessel originally held cosmetics but was reused to display an incantation.

A story was carved over the surface, describing the capture of something called a “devourer” which was said to bring “fire” to its victims. The only way a person could recover was to use the devourer’s own blood.

The incantation did not specify how the blood was to be administered or the creature’s identity. Illustrations suggested that it was either a centipede or a scorpion. The “fire” sounds like a painful sting.

The author was a magician called Rahim, who carved the advice in Aramaic 2,800 years ago. This made it the oldest Aramaic incantation ever found. Archaeologists believe that the incantation was important enough to preserve after the magician’s lifetime because the inscription was already over a century old by the time the temple was built.^[2]

8 Dirty Bathroom Jokes

Ancient bathrooms with floor mosaics are rare. When one was found in 2018 in Turkey’s ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum, it was a cause for celebration. However, the images were not beautifully rendered legends or geometric patterns. The tiny tiles told dirty jokes.

As Roman men visited the latrine around 1,800 years ago, they would have been amused by the antics of Narcissus and Ganymede. Both men belonged to real myths. Narcissus was in love with his own image. Ganymede was kidnapped by the god Zeus as a slave but also as a love interest.

The mosaics twisted the stories, first by giving Narcissus an ugly nose. Instead of admiring his reflection, he appeared to be fixated on his genitals. Ganymede’s scene was even more detailed. He was getting his private parts sponged clean by a heron. The type of sponge was usually reserved for cleaning toilets, and the bird represented Zeus.^[3]

The unusual theme stunned archaeologists but at least proved that bathroom humor is nothing new.

7 The Creswell Marks

The border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire is marked by a limestone gorge. Called Creswell Crags, the site is historically significant. Apart from past discoveries of ancient remains, Creswell holds the only Ice Age art in Britain.

After years of investigations, the caves managed to deliver a big surprise in 2019. A tour group stumbled upon the country’s largest collection of apotropaic marks. The engravings had nothing do to with the Ice Age gallery. The latter were thousands of years older, while the newfound carvings were from medieval times until the 19th century.

Historians recognized several of the symbols. Also called witches’ marks, their purpose was to protect the living from bad supernatural influences. Among the most popular was “VV,” invoking the Virgin Mary. Others—like boxes, mazes, and diagonal stripes—captured whatever mysterious evil brought diseases and made the crops fail.^[4]

Dense clusters of symbols lined the ceilings and walls of the caves, a testament to the local people’s fear of the unknown.

6 The Nag Hammadi Library

Around 1,400 years ago, a jar was buried in Egypt. Containing 13 codices, the vessel was rediscovered in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi. The rolls contained Gnostic records of Jesus. The Gnostic tradition, an early and sometimes mystical branch of Christianity, is considered to be heretical by mainstream Christians. Most were traditionally penned in Coptic, a language that was spoken in Egypt for centuries.^[5]

In 2017, researchers in Texas found that one codex was different. Instead of Coptic scribbles, the text was Greek. This was exceptional. The work in question, the First Apocalypse of James, had never been recovered in ancient Greek before. The piece covered a conversation between Jesus and James, the latter taking instructions on how to continue teaching after Jesus’s death.

Another feature that set the scroll apart was little dots that divided the text into syllables. This rare technique is known from educational texts, which suggested the writer used the heretical gospel to teach Greek to students.

5 Unique Palimpsest

Centuries ago, writing material was expensive. Sometimes, an old manuscript would be scraped clean and inked with new information. These recycled documents are known as palimpsests.

In 2018, Dr. Eleonore Cellard assessed fragments containing Quran script. She noticed ghostly letters behind the eighth-century Arabic text and identified several Bible passages. Written in Coptic, they belonged to the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy.

The find was extraordinary. Quran palimpsests are rare enough, but never before had a Christian document been erased to make space for the Islamic holy book. The writing style dated the Arabic text, but the Coptic was more difficult to place.^[6]

The fragility of the manuscript prevented carbon dating. Even if the document was strong enough, the technique can only date the paper and not the writing. Once again, the style was the only clue.

Unfortunately, it was a very broad one. The original Coptic was not written before the seventh century. Despite the dating issue, the palimpsest remains invaluable for its uniqueness.

4 Earliest Record Of Algol

The star Algol is actually a 3-in-1 deal. Officially discovered in 1669, the three suns move around each other, causing the “star” to dim and brighten. A papyrus studied in 2015 suggested that the ancient Egyptians discovered it first.

Called the Cairo Calendar, the document guided each day of the year, giving auspicious dates for ceremonies, forecasts, warnings, and even the activities of the gods. Previously, researchers felt the ancient calendar had a link to the heavens, but they never had any proof.

The study found that the calendar’s positive days matched Algol’s brightest days as well as those of the Moon. The appearances of one deity, Horus, also matched the star system’s 2,867-day cycle.

This strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptians were the first to follow Algol around 3,200 years ago. More remarkably, they did so without a telescope even though the system was almost 92.25 light-years away.^[7]

3 Unique Ninja Oath

In Japan, rumors of a written ninja oath persisted for almost 50 years. If true, this was a historic gem. Unlike movie ninjas, the real guys used stealth to gather intelligence and rarely used weapons. Most of their traditions and training were passed down verbally from master to student. A written document, especially an oath, would be a first.

In 2018, the piece finally surfaced. It was donated to a museum by the Kizu family, once a ninja clan from the town of Iga. The donated cache consisted of 130 ancient documents, but the oath was the most remarkable. Written by a man called Inosuke Kizu, he thanked his masters for the ninjutsu training and vowed to never reveal the secret knowledge. Not even to his immediate family.

The 300-year-old paper also captured the penalty of sharing ninja techniques with outsiders. The author accepted that his betrayal would cause his descendants to be tortured by the gods for generations. The letter was probably handed to his masters and returned to the Kizu family after his death.^[8]

2 Ferdinand’s Code

To safeguard military information from his enemies, King Ferdinand of Spain wrote in secret code. It was a little too effective. His correspondence with a commander named Gonzalo de Cordoba went undeciphered for 500 years.

Ferdinand sponsored Christopher Columbus’s trips to the Americas and fought several enemies. He recaptured Spain from the Moors in 1492 and battled France for the Mediterranean.

The letters promised interesting insights into the war king’s mind. Spain’s intelligence agency picked up the challenge. Ferdinand’s alphabet had 88 symbols, 237 letters, and six accompanying characters (such as numbers and triangles) that made each letter’s meaning more complex. In addition, the “language” ran continuously without breaks to indicate words.^[9]

In 2018, after six months, the agency cracked enough of the code to read four pieces of correspondence. They revealed details ranging from instructions on troop deployment in Italy to berating the commander for making decisions without Ferdinand’s approval. The breakthrough is a good step toward cracking the rest of the royal mail.

1 Extinct Language Spoken Again

A Cambridge academic loved ancient Babylonian so much that he decided to learn the language. Not just to read it but to speak it correctly. Babylonian went extinct around the time that Jesus was born.

Nearly 2,000 years of silence did not deter Dr. Martin Worthington, who already spoke Sumerian, Assyrian, English, Italian, and French. For over 20 years, he dove into ancient scripts and compiled a unique archive of research.

After gleaning correspondence, treaties, letters, and scientific reports written in Babylonian, Worthington arrived at a point where he could speak it. He was the first to admit that the project was not perfect. Although he could give a speech in the lost language, he was not fluent.

Worthington now teaches the language to Assyriology students, mainly to bring them closer to the ancient world they chose to study. Interestingly, if the two were to meet, ancient Babylonians might understand modern speakers because the language is related to Hebrew and Arabic, which replaced Babylonian as the Middle East’s dominant language.^[10]

These days, much of the history of the Americas before Europeans arrived has been lost or forgotten. This is a shame because the great civilizations of Central America hold stories as epic and intriguing as those of Ancient Greece and Rome. Take the cities of Tikal and Calakmul, which spent four centuries locked in a titanic struggle with twists and turns straight out of Game of Thrones.

10The Rise Of Tikal

The classic Mayan civilization stretched from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, and northern Honduras. This was difficult terrain, prone to drought and soil erosion. Yet here the Maya built one of the great civilizations of ancient America, mastering writing and mathematics. (They arguably invented zero before anyone else).

Unlike the Aztecs or Toltecs, the Maya were never united in one empire. Instead, they formed a squabbling network of city-states, not unlike ancient Greece. Warfare was limited and somewhat ceremonial. Trade was extensive.

The cities of Calakmul and Tikal grew particularly wealthy. Both dominated large areas of fertile territory and had access to chert mines. They traded in jade, obsidian, feathers, and other tropical luxuries, and their priests and merchants grew rich on the profits. During the reign of King Chak Tok Ich’aak, Tikal surpassed Calakmul and reached new heights of splendor and prestige.

Yet Chak Tok Ich’aak’s success was also at the root of his downfall. Even as Tikal’s palaces and monuments rose more splendid than ever before, the city’s wealth attracted attention from far beyond the Mayan lands. In the distant highlands of central Mexico, powers vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded Tikal with envious eyes and slowly drew up plans against it.

9The Invasion

Over 1,000 kilometers (600 mi) from Tikal in the Valley of Mexico near what is now Mexico City, an immense and mysterious city rises. We still don’t know who built it or how to read their language. We don’t even know its real name. The Aztecs, who wandered awed through the ruins a millennium later, dubbed it Teotihuacan, “the place where men become gods.”

It’s understandable that the Aztecs were impressed because Teotihuacan was huge. Its population was well over 100,000, making it easily the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time. Its monuments were gargantuan: The Pyramid of the Sun is one of the largest ever built, and the Pyramid of the Moon is only slightly smaller. The Street of the Dead runs for 2.5 kilometers (1.5 mi) between the main temples. Its warriors roamed far and wide, distinguished by their unusual shell goggles and the obsidian mirrors strapped to their backs.

Immigrants from all over Central America flocked to Teotihuacan, turning it into a melting pot of different cultures and languages. From atop the pyramids, a priestly class occasionally carried out human sacrifices. The city’s political structure remains subject to debate, but by the AD 370s, it seems to have been under the control of a powerful figure known as Spearthrower Owl. In 378, he watched as his army marched out of Teotihuacan and headed east for Tikal.

8‘Fire Is Born’

Spearthrower Owl didn’t accompany the army himself. Instead, it was commanded by a general the Maya called Siyaj K’ak’ (“Fire Is Born”). They also dubbed him “Ochk’in Kaloomte” (“Lord of the West”), reflecting his origins in Teotihuacan. Mayan cities quailed as his army passed, and at least four of them seem to have recorded the event in murals depicting elaborately costumed and heavily armed Teotihuacano warriors. They easily stand out compared to the Maya, who are depicted in simple breechcloths and headdresses.

In January 378, Siyaj K’ak’ appeared in Waka’, a town just west of Tikal. Exactly eight days later on January 14 (8.17.1.4.12 on the Mayan calendar), he arrived in Tikal. In their helmets and goggles, the warlike Teotihuacanos must have been a fearsome sight and Chak Tok Ich’aak was apparently unable to mount any meaningful resistance. Siyaj K’ak’ forced his way into the palace that very same day, and King Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water” of the Mayan afterlife. We can assume that he was either quietly murdered or encouraged to commit suicide.

Siyaj K’ak’ presumably had the dead king’s family murdered as well. (They certainly disappear from the historical record immediately afterward). His soldiers also broke or damaged all of Tikal’s preconquest monuments and inscriptions. A year after the invasion, Spearthrower Owl’s son came down from Teotihuacan and was crowned the new king of Tikal.

7Building An Empire

While Spearthrower Owl’s son sat on the throne, Siyaj K’ak’ continued to expand his new empire. Shortly after the conquest of Tikal, the city of Uaxactun seems to have been overrun and made part of the Tikal kingdom. Stelae in the city depict heavily armed Teotihuacan warriors, and historians believe these show Siyaj K’ak’ conquering the city. Archaeologists found five murdered noble women and children buried beneath one of the stelae—the slaughtered family of Uaxactun’s last king.

In 393, Siyaj K’ak’ marched into Rio Azul, a city in what is now Guatemala. Clearly, the Maya remained no match for his goggled warriors. An altar depicts the sacrifice of eight members of the city’s old ruling class, and Rio Azul became subject to Tikal. This was a huge victory since Rio Azul lay on the River Hondo, a crucial trade route to the Caribbean coast. The city’s conquest secured this route and allowed Tikal to suck trade away from rival cities like Calakmul.

At some point, Siyak K’ak’ also seems to have installed a new ruling family in the famed Mayan city of Palenque. As a new Mayan calendar cycle approached (the year 9.0.0.0.0 was in 435 AD), it seemed that Teotihuacano-Tikal was poised to dominate the entire Mayan world.

6Tikal Consolidates Power

Spearthrower Owl’s son died in AD 411, and Siyaj K’ak’ presumably passed away a few years earlier. The new king of Tikal was Spearthrower Owl’s grandson, Siyaj Chan K’awiil II, who tried to consolidate the new kingdom by appealing to his Mayan subjects. His monuments and murals depict him in Mayan dress and emphasize his Mayan mother. Even his name was taken from an earlier Mayan ruler of Tikal rather than his Teotihuacano ancestors.

But that doesn’t mean he tried to hide his central Mexican roots. While Siyaj Chan K’awiil had himself depicted in Mayan costume, he kept Spearthrower Owl’s glyph on his crown. In several monuments, Siyaj Chan K’awiil sits in Mayan dress while the spirit of his father looks on wearing full Teotihuacan military gear. This must have been an effective propaganda campaign: “I’m one of you,” the monuments declared, “but remember the power I have behind me.”

Meanwhile, “New Tikal” continued to expand. In 426, Siyaj Chan K’awiil raised a warrior known as K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ to the rank of king and sent him to seize the city of Copan in what is now Honduras. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ also conquered the city of Quirigua, giving the Tikal-Copan entity control of the entire Motagua Valley. Under Siyaj Chan K’awiil’s immediate successors, Tikal continued to expand and consolidate its dominant position. And it seemed the other Mayan cities could only look on in fear and jealousy.

5The Star War

Today, the temples of Calakmul rise like icebergs out of the immense jungles of Campeche. But in its heyday, the city ruled one of the largest and most powerful Mayan kingdoms. It was the home of the Kaan dynasty, a particularly long-lasting and resourceful family of priest-kings who had relocated to Calakmul after their ancient power base at El Mirador went into decline.

After the Teotihuacanos arrived, the Kaan watched helplessly as they were eclipsed by the rising power of Tikal. (The conquest of Rio Azul was a clear attempt to cut Calakmul out of the rich Caribbean trade routes). But as time passed, the Maya began to master central Mexican weapons like the spear-thrower and Tikal’s warriors began to lose their mystique.

But Tikal remained too large and powerful for Calakmul to challenge head-on. So a Kaan ruler known as Sky Witness decided to outflank it instead. Doubtless appealing to Mayan solidarity and jealousy of the Teotihuacanos, Sky Witness constructed a delicate alliance of Mayan cities surrounding Tikal. The noose was complete by 556 when Tikal’s most powerful vassal, the huge city of Caracol, betrayed it to join the alliance. Between Calakmul in the north and Caracol in the south, Tikal was caught in a pincer.

After years of strangling Tikal, Sky Witness decided to finish it. In 562, Calakmul and Caracol launched a “Star War.” This was basically the Mayan equivalent of total war: The aim was to completely crush the opposing state. Their combined armies overran Tikal, defaced its monuments, and ritually sacrificed its king. It was a huge victory. But things weren’t over yet.

4The Wrath Of Kaan

The Kaan were unimaginably ancient and power-hungry. From the great city of El Mirador, they had been at the forefront of the preclassic period of Mayan history, and now Calakmul looked set to dominate the classic period. After defeating Tikal in 562, they installed a puppet king and an onerous peace agreement. For the next century, no new monuments were permitted in Tikal and much of the city’s wealth was siphoned off to Calakmul.

Shortly afterward, the Kaan destroyed Rio Azul, cementing their control of the Rio Hondo trade. They also probably attacked Copan, whose monuments were destroyed or defaced during this period. The Kaan ruler Scroll Serpent lead a huge expedition to distant Palenque where he executed the king, a descendant of the ruler put in place by Siyaj K’ak’ all those years ago. No challenge to Sky Witness’s alliance was allowed. When the city of Naranjo tried to leave the alliance to attack Caracol, the Kaan ransacked it and tortured its king to death.

But Tikal’s size and resources meant it remained a potential threat, and the Kaan watched it like a hawk for any sign of defiance. In 629, Tikal tried to found a new city at Dos Pilas. In response, the Kaan invaded and forced the ruler of Dos Pilas (the king of Tikal’s own brother) to become a vassal of Calakmul instead. But they were never able to fully destroy Tikal, which remained a sleeping giant waiting to be awakened.

3Tikal Turns The Tide

In 682, a new king rose to the throne in Tikal. Jasaw Chan K’awiil was possessed by an iron determination to restore Tikal’s power. As a child, he had seen his father humiliated by Calakmul and Dos Pilas. But he also sensed that the Calakmul alliance was weakening. As soon as he took the throne, he began work on giant monuments and inscriptions, the first in Tikal for over a century.

Tikal’s situation was precarious: The city was still surrounded by the great ring of the Calakmul alliance, including El Peru in the west, Naranjo in the east, Dos Pilas and Caracol in the south, and Masaal and Calakmul in the north. Faced with this formidable league, Jasaw Chan K’awiil decided on a bold roll of the dice. Bypassing the smaller cities, he launched a surprise attack on Calakmul itself. In 695, his army “brought down the flint and shield” of Calakmul and won a dramatic victory.

Jasaw returned to Tikal covered in glory and held a great triumph on the anniversary of Spearthrower Owl’s death. A carving of the event from Tikal’s royal palace shows Jasaw bedecked in full Teotihuacan military gear, looming triumphantly over an imprisoned Kaan lord being prepared for sacrifice.

With Calakmul on the back foot, Tikal’s rulers set about dismantling the alliance that hemmed them in. Jasaw himself subdued Masaal in the north while his son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil, defeated El Peru and Naranjo in a single year-long campaign. Yik’in Chan K’awiil also launched another attack on Calakmul itself, capturing and sacrificing the Kaan ruler.

However, Dos Pilas in the south remained stubbornly defiant, defeating a Tikal invasion force in 705. That must have particularly hurt because Dos Pilas was still run by a distant branch of Tikal’s ruling family.

2A Tropical Cold War

With the alliance broken, Calakmul watched jealously as Tikal’s wealth and power grew. But neither city was ever able to completely destroy the other. This period of Mayan history has been compared to the Cold War, with the two superpowers warily watching each other and engaging in numerous skirmishes and proxy wars.

For example, Tikal had been allied with Copan since it was conquered by K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (see entry 6). K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ had also conquered the city of Quirigua and made it a vassal of Copan. But in 738, the Kaan encouraged Quirigua to revolt. With support from Calakmul, the Quiriguans seized and decapitated Copan’s king, severely weakening Tikal’s most important ally.

Such proxy wars became increasingly common as Tikal and Calakmul repeatedly invaded neighboring cities to put friendly rulers on the throne. Without confronting each other directly, their fortunes ebbed and flowed and the records of neighboring cities are full of nervous mentions of the two titans. Teotihuacan had long since declined, and Spearthrower Owl was forgotten in the Valley of Mexico. But in the Yucatan, his descendants fought on against the ancient snake glyph of the Kaan.

Warfare became increasingly common and frantic across the region. As Calakmul’s sphere of influence receded, Dos Pilas lost control of its vassals and the Petexbatun region descended into complete chaos. The people of Dos Pilas tore down their temples to build defensive walls while the ruling family (still distant relations of Tikal’s kings) fled to the fortress of Aguateca, guarded by a mighty ravine. At Punta de Chimino on Lake Petexbatun, the people built a formidable network of walls and moats. But the fighting was terrifyingly intense, and both Aguateca and Punta de Chimino were stormed and destroyed.

Meanwhile, both Calakmul and Tikal continued to grow. The city of Calakmul alone now housed more than 120,000, with larger numbers in its surrounding kingdom. But there were already signs of decline. As the centers struggled to hold on, things were falling apart.

1The Great Collapse

Beginning at the start of the ninth century AD, the classical Mayan civilization dramatically collapsed. The great cities of the lowlands lost most of their population or were abandoned entirely, to be swallowed up by the jungle. The great dynasties vanished, and monuments and temples fell into ruins. Mayan civilization continued in the north in trading towns like Chichen Itza, dominated by merchants rather than autocratic priest-kings. But the era of sprawling cities and huge building projects was over.

The reasons for this collapse remain one of the great mysteries of history. We now know that it coincided with a period of sustained drought, which almost certainly played a role. Probably the land could no longer sustain the huge population. Tikal, for example, built huge reservoirs to keep the city going through the four-month dry season. But years of low rainfall would have defeated even Mayan ingenuity. However, drought alone can’t explain the collapse—the cities of the north lasted far longer than those of the lowlands, even though the north was much drier.

Whatever the reason, the collapse finally ended the 400-year conflict between Tikal and Calakmul. Locked in their titanic struggle, the two cities probably never saw it coming. The war almost certainly sapped the Mayan ability to respond to the catastrophe facing them. Calakmul was one of the first cities to go, losing all cohesion by about AD 810. Tikal held on for another 50 years, but eventually, it was abandoned, too. The sons of Spearthrower Owl and the Kaan dynasty disappeared from history.

After the collapse, a small population hung on in Calakmul and occasionally erected crude monuments in imitation of their ancestors. But the writing inscribed on them was nonsensical. They no longer remembered how to write.

Ancient bones can return a wealth of information to the modern researcher. But they can’t ever truly reveal the dead’s lost humanity. Only when the hollow sockets become the thoughtful eyes of a girl or healed fractures give a knight a handsome scar does time vanish as skeletons turn back into real human beings.

10Ava

Nearly four millennia ago, a young woman died in ancient Britain, and she was unusual. Ava’s skull was strange, and so was her grave.

Nicknamed “Ava” after Achavanich, where she was unearthed in 1987, and aged 18 to 22, she most likely belonged to the Beaker people, a European group with short and rounded skulls. But Ava’s head was uneven yet shapely enough to suggest deliberate binding.

During the Middle Bronze Age, it was customary to bury the dead under a cairn or in a soil pit. Ava’s unmarked grave was cut with a lot of effort into solid rock. A beaker found inside also hinted that Ava was special—its designs have never been seen before. She died too young and from unknown causes.

9The Mary Rose Archer

The Mary Rose was the flagship of King Henry VIII’s war fleet. She sank over 500 years ago and took many souls to the bottom of the sea. In 1982, the wreck was raised with a dead crew of 92 skeletons.

Historical accounts mention elite troops onboard, and this meant longbow archers. One such identified archer was an impressive 2 meters (6 ft) tall—well above the average Tudor male. Personal items indicated his rank was high and his built had to be powerful to draw the tough 16th-century longbow.

To reveal what this crack soldier looked like, a scan of his skull was fed into a 3-D printer that popped out an exact replica. The archer’s face was reconstructed around the printed skull. The result showed a man with a no-nonsense look that would make any opponent think twice.

8The USS Monitor

A more recent maritime tragedy involved the USS Monitor, the Navy’s first ironclad warship. She sank in a storm In 1862, while being towed off Cape Hatteras. Almost 150 years onward, her gun turret resurfaced through a joint effort by the Navy and NOAA. Inside, they found a pair of skeletons, two of only 16 Civil War sailors to be recovered.

After reconstructing them, NOAA released the images. One of the men who drowned in the turret was very young, between 17 and 24, and had movie star good looks. His companion, although about the same height and also white, was older. Aged 30 to 40, he was likely an avid pipe smoker and had a wide face dotted with close-set eyes and a big nose.

7The Girl Of Uchter Moor

In 2000, a peat harvester in Germany pulled up a body. Police initially thought it was the missing Elke Kerll, but a DNA test disproved this. She was dubbed “Moora” after Uchter Moor where she was found. Her origins languished for years until her missing hand turned up in the same area. More tests showed that the bog body wasn’t modern but a teenager who had died during the Iron Age.

Five independent teams recreated five slightly different Mooras. But most of her features—eyes, nose, and cheekbones—were all alike. Moora’s behavior still confounds experts.

She went deeply into the bog, a highly dangerous thing to do. Was the teen fleeing or collecting bilberries (a mind-altering fruit)? Whatever followed, the lack of ancient skeletal trauma indicates an accident rather than murder ended her short life.

6The Silla Skull

The Silla Kingdom controlled much of the Korean Peninsula (57 BC–AD 935), but despite being one of the most enduring and influential dynasties, complete skeletons from that period are scarce. Incredibly, a perfectly preserved grave was found in 2013, that of a woman’s.

Her skull was fragmented but, once assembled, revealed a strange elongated head researchers don’t believe was the result of binding. Had she suffered this procedure, the bones in the front of her skull would’ve been flatter, and the sides would’ve grown more to adjust to the pressure of flattening. The Silla woman shows none of this. Her skull is normal except for its odd shape. Experts believe that it might’ve been a natural occurrence, albeit rare, in the ethnic group during that era.

5The French Mummy

Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793, and King Henry IV of France had his long-dead head removed, as revolutionaries desecrated as many royal tombs as they could find. Rediscovered in a private collection, the skull’s face was digitally returned, and to the excitement of researchers, it mirrored known depictions of Henry, a mole and ear piercing included.

The embalming method fits historical records of how Henry’s body was prepared, but it obscures the papery mummy’s identity. Sure, the face resembles Henry, but the embalming and careless modern handling contaminated the DNA so much that it can no longer be compared with his living descendants.

4The Stirling Knight

It’s not often one can meet a real medieval knight. But renovations at Stirling Castle made this possible when the body of a young man was unearthed. Near him, a woman had her head crushed, possibly by a mace. The pair was part of 10 skeletons discovered, including two babies. A siege appeared to have been behind their violent deaths.

His skeleton revealed the powerful physique of someone trained since boyhood with weapons and horses. Healed injuries proved he was a professional soldier who had survived some hairy battles. A facial reconstruction showed the scars of old wounds. Unexpectedly, documents revealed his name. He was Sir John de Stricheley, an English nobleman who died in 1341, possibly felled by a Scottish arrow.

3The Flores Woman

Better known as the controversial “hobbit ,” her remains were found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, standing an adorable 1 meter (3 ft) tall. A recent artistic rendering showed that the 30-year-old had high cheekbones and large eyes. The more accurate software showed that the woman had modern features rather than the monkey look paleo-artists previously credited her with.

While researchers say she’s no beauty queen, missing much of what one would call a forehead, it remains incredible to see such a long lost part of the human family tree. That is, if she is even an ancient human. Officially called Homo floresiensis, she lived 18,000 years ago and with a different-shaped brain and wrist bones more consistent with apes. Scientists believe she might be an entirely new species.

2Dante

When Dante’s skull was turned back into a face, researchers were surprised to see that he differed from traditional depictions of the man. Usually, he is shown with a stern or severe expression, but when his features were revealed through forensic efforts, Dante had a softer gaze and looked a whole lot friendlier. However, his famously hooked nose was spot-on.

Among other difficulties, Dante suffered the death of his beloved Beatrice and banishment from Florence in 1302 for opposing Pope Boniface VIII. His actual bones remain hidden by Italian monks who refused scientists access to them. Dante’s face was recreated using a replica skull.

1St. Anthony

When a Brazilian expert was asked to reconstruct the appearance of an ancient person, all he was told was that the skull belonged to a 36-year-old man. The face was that of an ordinary-looking male, perhaps somebody easily forgotten when passed on the street. Only afterward did the expert find out that he had helped millions of believers to gaze upon the real face of Saint Anthony.

Born in 1195, St. Anthony became a monk at 15 when he joined the Augustinians. Two remarkable events mark the career of this great saint, one in life and the other in death. While alive, he personally met with the famous St. Francis of Assisi, and the second was how fast he was canonized. The second fastest in history, St. Anthony was sainted merely a year after he died at a convent in 1231.

+The Face Of God

The most explosive headline in human history would be the announcement that the skull of Jesus Christ has been found. Unfortunately, there is no sign of it. Unfolding the next best thing, researchers studied the Turin Shroud. Whether it’s a clever artistic fraud or a real miracle, one cannot resist looking into what could very well be the face of Christ.

Employing sketch artist expertise and computer graphics, specialists recreated both the body and the face of the man-print on the Shroud. The results matched the historical portrayals of Jesus. Even if the 3-D pictures are a little rough-edged, they are believed to be the most accurate Turin reconstruction.

Pictured here is Ray Downing’s final illustration of the Man in the Shroud. Downing was the artist who created the reconstruction for the History Channel. Whether you believe this is the face of God or not, it is certainly quite an accomplishment to take a reverse image from an ancient cloth and turn it into a virtually-photographic quality reproduction.