There are a variety of ways that you can die depending on where you are and what you’re doing when it happens. Although some individuals peacefully pass in their sleep, others have to go through immensely uncomfortable and drawn-out deaths.

SEE ALSO: 10 Weird Causes Of Death Through History ?utm_source=seealso&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=direct

Death itself isn’t surprising. What’s astonishing is that you may die from the most mundane and unexpected parts of daily life. We all do these seemingly insignificant things without thinking twice about them. However, somewhere out there, someone has found a way to die because of them in one way or another.

10 Doing Nothing

We’ve already established that there’s no way to escape dying. Our bodies are inherently designed to do that when enough time passes—unless we manage to die earlier, which is always a possibility given how clumsy we are as a species.

One would think that unnatural deaths could be completely avoided by doing nothing at all. It stands to reason that if you’re doing nothing, you’re not doing anything that can kill you earlier than you’re supposed to die. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case as doing nothing has a kill count of its own.

Yup, it kills about 5.3 million people every year. Scientists say that it’s almost as bad as smoking or obesity, and we should make sure to keep moving around to lower our chances of being included in that statistic.

We’re not saying that it doesn’t make sense as physical inactivity is known to be an unhealthy habit. All we’re saying is that we didn’t know that sitting on your couch all day can actually kill you.^[1]

9 Sneezing

Depending on where you are in the world, people’s responses to sneezing could range from blessing you to telling you the correct way to do it so as not to offend them. However, it’s not a particularly noteworthy bodily function.

Even if we don’t fully understand the mechanics behind sneezing, we shrug and go about our daily lives without ever thinking about it. Of course, that’s until we find out that it’s also one of the few regular functions of the body that can kill you.

You see, sneezing triggers some powerful responses in the body, especially among all the organs involved in the process. Many people suggest blocking your mouth and nose to keep you from making sounds during sneezing. As one man found out, that is one way of absolutely destroying your pharynx and general throat area.

That’s not the only way it can kill you, either. People have died from it in a variety of ways—from brain hemorrhage to heart attacks caused directly by sneezing.^[2]

8 Taking The Stairs

Taking the stairs is a fairly normal part of our daily routine that we don’t really think about a lot as, let’s face it, they’re stairs. Thinking about whether they can kill us is the equivalent of worrying if walls can kill us. Even if the stairs do cause injuries due to the accidental fall here and there, it certainly doesn’t come across as something with a fatality rate.

However, multiple studies conducted around the world have shown that stairs are deadlier than we give them credit for. In the UK, around 1,000 people die from falling down stairs every year. This is ridiculously high if you think about it. The researchers assume that most of it is just the elderly doing elderly things.

Another study in India found out that most people who died on stairs were in the 31–40 age group, followed by 21–30. In contrast, US statistics show that only 27 people die due to elevators every year, even though viral accident videos tell us that elevators are supposed to be a whole lot scarier than the stairs.^[3]

7 Mowing Your Lawn

Having a lawn is out of reach for many people due to skyrocketing real estate prices across the country. However, for the select few who do, mowing it is one of the regular parts of their weekly routine.

Although it’s probably easy to find a way to die from a lawnmower if you really want to, it’s not more dangerous than any other machine you have in the house. (You can always accidentally stick your head in the mixer.) However, if you check out the stats on how many people manage to kill themselves mowing their lawns, you’d be surprised.

It was highlighted by Kim Kardashian in one of her tweets. She pointed out that 69 people died due to lawnmowers every year. That’s just the deaths. In addition, about 250,000 people injure themselves using the lawnmower every year.^[4]

6 Furniture

If you live in a house, chances are that it has furniture unless you’re going for the really minimal Instagram look that’s all the rage these days. Even if nearly all of us have stubbed our toe on a chair or some other mundane piece of furniture at some point, it doesn’t come across as something that could kill you in the way that leaving the gas on could.

Yet, furniture causes an unexpected number of deaths across the world every year. Many of them are due to accidental tipping.

Now we aren’t sure if furniture manufacturers are still not skilled enough at their jobs after all these years of practice. But we know that a bunch of consumer checks are in place before you can set up a furniture retail store. As for the numbers, a child dies due to a piece of furniture falling on top of him every two weeks in the US. About 2,800 injuries were reported in 2016 alone.^[5]

5 Balloons

Balloons are a common decoration at a wide variety of events—from Christmas to birthday parties to surprise interventions. Even though our fascination with balloons drops in direct proportion to how old we get, we don’t exactly think of them as deadly.

For the one-off ridiculously stupid person who may decide to swallow them for some unfathomable reason, health care has come far enough to stop it from being a fatal accident. Right? Not really.

Even in 2019, a surprisingly high number of people—primarily children—die of choking on balloons, and none of our futuristic health care can do anything to stop it.

Of course, there are other things in the house that kids can swallow and choke on, too. But balloons are particularly dangerous because they can obstruct the breathing pipes more effectively than most other things. That’s because balloons are all elastic and rubbery. It’s difficult to get them out even if you do make it to the ER in time.^[6]

4 Playing Golf

Depending on how rich and old you are, golf is either a leisurely activity you indulge in on weekends or a highly competitive sport you regularly play with a whole group of equally competitive friends. We won’t say it’s impossible to die on a golf course if you really try, but rogue golf balls hitting people in the wrong spot cause more fatalities than you’d think.^[7]

A ridiculously high number of people have died from flying golf balls. These individuals were just in the unfortunate path of the golf ball—like a 10-year-old boy in Alabama or a 69-year-old man in California or even a 27-year-old in Queensland, New Zealand.

3 Going To A Doctor

Of course, we’re not talking about serious diseases that will kill you nonetheless, only a bit faster if you don’t go to the doctor. We’re talking about the general phenomenon of visiting a doctor as a surprisingly high number of people die from faulty prescriptions and medical errors that could have been avoided.

The most surprising culprit? Bad handwriting from doctors.

Anyone who has ever thought “no way anyone can read this” was right after all, according to the numbers at least. Every year, about 7,000 people die due to bad handwriting with prescriptions per a study by the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine.

In addition, general medical errors cause a whopping 250,000 deaths every year. That’s a conservative number depending on which study you’re reading. (The estimate can go as high as 440,000.)^[8]

2 Doing Your Laundry

We’re used to the idea of certain things in the household turning dangerous if not taken care of—like heavy-duty computers or exposed power sockets. However, none of those things have anything on doing your laundry.

If you thought there was no way that washing your clothes—especially the part where you dry them—can pose any sort of danger to you, let alone kill you, it’s time to rethink your approach to laundry. Regularly taking care of the dryer may someday prove to be the difference between staying alive and, well, not.

The US Fire Administration even has a special instructions manual for using the clothes dryer, which kills an average of 13 people and injures 444 every year in the US. The primary cause is the dryer catching fire due to reasons like not cleaning out the lint after every round or just generally not taking care of your electronic equipment like a responsible person.^[9]

1 Taking A Bath

Unless you’re not a part of civilized society or you’re not bathing on a dare or something, we assume that you take a bath every day (or at least regularly). It’s not exactly rocket science. You go in, splash yourself with water, wash with some soap, dry yourself, and come back out. It’s a mundane part of our everyday routine. If not for the irritating need to stay clean to be presentable to people, most of us wouldn’t even bother with it.

For a part of such a basic routine, though, taking a bath puts you at an unnaturally high risk of dying if statistics are to be believed. In the US alone, an average of 335 people die due to drowning in their own bathtubs every year. You’d think that most of them were kids or the elderly, but about half of those deaths were able-bodied adults.^[10]

Surprisingly, another common cause of dying inside the bathroom is hot water. Apparently, 20 people in the UK lose their lives every year due to burns from scalding water.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs here, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Jobs. There are a million of them out there, and most have one thing in common: boredom. Turning human beings into mindless cogs in the machine, the soul-crushing tedium of modern occupations can be scary for sure.

But that’s nothing compared to the horrors endured by the workforces of yesteryear. Thumb though a history book, and suddenly, even the most run-of-the-mill job springs to truly terrifying life. Keep these vicious vocations in mind the next time you find yourself praying for five o’clock.

10 Waiting Tables

Waiting tables has long been the domain of struggling actors and those working on their screenplays; it’s sort of a holding-pattern profession, not something you aspire to. But the ancient world somehow found a way to make this most humble of professions even less profitable and even more degrading.

The wealthy of ancient Rome were fond of a good feast. They would attend lavish banquets and gorge themselves on wine and various delicacies, all served by slaves, until they simply couldn’t eat another bite. But what was a Roman aristocrat to do when a full belly came a little too early in the evening? They made some room.

Excusing themselves from the party, diners would occasionally force themselves to vomit in order to rejoin the feast (in a not-too-dissimilar manner to some of our own size 0 models and actresses). The downtrodden waitstaff—slaves—would then mop up the last course before returning to serve up the next. And they didn’t even get a tip. Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, the Romans did not purge themselves in rooms called vomitoria or vomitoriums—those were simply passages in an amphitheater.

9 Cutting Hair

Between sweeping up other people’s hair and forcing boring small talk, the duties of a modern barber aren’t exactly glamorous. But luckily for those aspiring stylists out there, the last few centuries have done a great job filtering the unbridled horror out of a job that once left our ancestors scarred in more ways than one.

In addition to trimming hair, the barbers of medieval Europe held a host of other job titles. They dabbled in dentistry by extracting the rotten teeth of their clients. They played doctor by selling various primitive medicines, performing bloodletting, and even giving enemas. Though most shocking were the duties of the notorious barber-surgeons.

As the terrifying title suggests, these barbers made a living hacking open their customers. Barely trained and almost never literate, these maniacs’ attempts at medicine were little more than butchery.

It was common for bloodstained rags to be seen hanging from the walls of the barbershop, inspiring the iconic red-and-white poles we still see today. Luckily, barbers were forbidden to do anything but cut hair by King George II in 1745.

8 Bartending

The gravest dangers facing barkeeps today are bad tips and the occasional drunken brawl. Other than that, it’s pretty cut-and-dried. Even if a mistake is made, the worst that can be expected is a demanded refund. But that wasn’t the case in 17th-century Europe.

During the Tudor era, it was common for brewers to sell their products directly to the alcohol-crazed masses. The ale went bad in a matter of days, so alehouses—or taverns—brewed their ale on-site to serve it as quickly as possible. This was a pretty efficient system, but the fact that nonprofessionals were handling the brewing often led to bad batches. People didn’t like bad batches.

Punishments for inferior ale were swift and bizarrely severe. In addition to fines, the offending brewer, which was traditionally a woman, would have her entire stock confiscated and distributed for free to the poor.

But strangest of all was the use of the “ducking-stool.” The “alewife” in question would be tied to a chair on the end of a long pole and submerged in dirty water. This primitive waterboarding was used on countless women whose only crimes were making a few bad drinks.

7 Making Musical Instruments

Modern instrument manufacturing is typically carried out like any other kind of modern manufacturing—on a cold, monotonous assembly line. Workers are essentially soulless living machinery, but the experience still beats the methods used in ages past.

Violin strings were, and occasionally still are, made of only the finest sheep intestines. Violin manufacturers would often set up shop right next door to the local slaughterhouse to get their hands on the grisly guts the moment they were cut from the sheep.

Then the manufacturers would cart their haul back to the factory and set about scraping out the feces, blood, fat, and slime. This would all be done by hand as the intestines were too delicate for machinery to handle.

After cleaning, the guts were wound up and dried to produce the violin strings. Ironically, this gruesome process was said to result in the most beautiful-sounding strings. If they were cleaned properly, that is. If not, they were known to begin rotting on the violin.

6 Hairdressing

Modern hairdressing may be looked down upon by some, but the stylists of the ancient world were the targets of almost universal disgust. Far from their chatty, hairspray-blasted modern counterparts, hairdressers in ancient Rome were slaves who reeked of several less pleasant substances.

Called ornatrixes, these pitiable professionals spent their lives catering to the whims of the ultra-vain elite. The pressure was intense as a mistake meant a brutal whipping, but that still wasn’t the worst part of the job.

There were no hair products back in the day, forcing the dedicated ornatrix to improvise. Bile, cuttlefish ink, and even decomposed leeches were mixed to produce dark hair dye, but bleaching was even worse. Pigeon droppings and ash were slathered onto the scalp and then rinsed out with human urine.

However, the ornatrix’s worst days came from dandruff sufferers as the Romans believed that a flaky scalp could be cured with human feces.

5 Washing Clothes

Aside from dry cleaners, you would be hard-pressed to find a laundry washing professional in modern society. Washing machines and detergents have made the task so easy that there really isn’t a need for a dedicated laundry person. But there used to be, and his job was truly disgusting.

Again, ancient Rome is to blame for the foulness of what should be a squeaky-clean profession. Large vats were a common sight on Roman streets, which acted as primitive public restrooms. Citizens would wander by, urinate into them, and go about their business. When the vats were full, they were hauled off to the local fullonica.

This building was the ancient equivalent of a laundromat. Workers would pour the massive jugs of strangers’ urine into large tubs with the dirty laundry. But that was only step one.

Next, they would stand knee-deep in the urine-filled tubs and stomp around to agitate the clothes. Ironically, the ammonia in urine is great for breaking down dirt and grease, making this a surprisingly effective process.

4 Party Planning

Whether it’s a graduation party, wedding reception, or just a weekend house party, a lot goes into crafting the perfect get-together—so much that many people choose to make their living coordinating such events. But odds are that none of them have ever been asked to plan a night of group sex.

As you may have guessed by now, this extremely dirty job comes to us from ancient Rome. Emperors had their own personal orgy planners committed to throwing the largest and filthiest sex parties imaginable. Often lasting multiple days, Rome’s elite would meet at these carnal carnivals to indulge in acts so legendarily lurid that they would be painted on public walls for all to enjoy.

While this may sound like a dream job to some, it comes with a catch. Humiliated family members of partygoers sometimes “vented their frustrations” on the orgy planner or his employer. That’s a diplomatic way of saying that the family brutally tortured and murdered the orgy planner.

3 Working In A Carnival

Working in a carnival is by no means a pleasant experience. Sitting outside, listening to screaming kids, and huffing fumes from the Tilt-A-Whirl isn’t exactly paradise. Luckily, today’s carnival goer is a bit more squeamish than his early-20th-century counterpart or it would be so much worse.

The word “geek” is usually used to describe the socially awkward, but it began as the title for a carnival performer. This performer did only one thing: He bit the heads off things, including snakes and rats but usually live chickens. Playing the role of a savage “wild man,” the carny shocked crowds with his gruesome and bloody displays.

But it gets worse. Obviously, very few would volunteer for this position, so carnival owners were notorious for finding homeless drug addicts for the part. The owners would simply offer the addicts their fix in exchange for a performance.

The addict was given a razor blade to sneakily cut the neck of the animal, making his job easier—at first. Once the “performer” was completely dependent on the owner, the razor was taken away, leaving the carnival with a brand-new geek.

2 Making Hats

Like so many professions, the job of hatmaking has been simplified to the point of being phased out. Machines have replaced most of the workers, making modern hatters little more than glorified factory equipment. But that may not be such a bad thing.

The 17th century gave us one of the worst manufacturing innovations in history. “Carroting” was a hatmaking shortcut that allowed hatters to work their stiff materials into complex shapes more easily. By simply washing the fabric with mercury nitrate—which temporarily turned it orange, hence the name—the fabric was much more workable, cutting down production time. It seemed like a miracle—until hatters started losing their minds.

As it turns out, holding a mercury-soaked wad of cloth inches from your face for years isn’t the healthiest pastime. Breathing mercury fumes allows the deadly metal to build up in the body and attack the nervous system as well as the teeth and gums.

This led to a rash of “mad hatters.” Their poisoning led them to drool, lose teeth, shake uncontrollably, and eventually suffer permanent brain damage. This is actually where we get the phrase “mad as a hatter.”

1 Making Matchsticks

No one would argue that matches are dangerous. But barring a freak fire, how could making the tiny, innocuous sticks possibly be harmful? Just dip a few pieces of wood into some incendiary sludge, and call it a day. Sure, it would be tedious, but it’s easy money. Right?

Well, no. It turns out that one of the most gruesome workplace epidemics of the 19th and 20th centuries was suffered by workers producing “strike anywhere” matches. Yellow phosphorus—which we now call white phosphorus—was needed to produce these matches, and factory workers spent 10–15 hours a day handling the dangerous substance. However, its danger came not from the potential for burns but from the fumes it produced.

In 1838, the first case of “phossy jaw” was recorded. After breathing poisonous phosphorus fumes in a matchstick factory, workers began to experience intense pain and swelling in their lower faces. They started to lose teeth, and large, open sores appeared along their jawlines.

Both skin and bone rotted and fell away, leaving the hapless employee permanently disfigured. The only course of action was a complete removal of the jaw. Luckily, the early 20th century saw strict regulations, if not outright bans, placed on phosphorus match production.

Ian is a struggling writer who suddenly doesn’t feel so bad about that.

There is no denying that flashy or highly unusual artifacts are fascinating. As the world of archaeology turns more glitzy, these items hit the headlines more than their dull, unglamorous counterparts.

But history holds no such prejudice. Sometimes, it’s the more mundane artifacts that tell us the most about our ancestors and how they lived. A lump of tar, an erased page, or a dead bee can change what we know in an instant. No glitter required.

10 The Glue Caves

For decades, caves in Germany yielded what appeared to be lowly tar lumps. Although they were indeed tar lumps, they were far from lowly. Researchers have always known that the ancients used tar as an adhesive and sealant. But these 200,000-year-old globs were found in caves and on tools where Neanderthals lived.

Recent times have painted a new picture of this extinct human cousin. Instead of spending the day brainlessly clubbing anything that moved, Neanderthals are now credited with a complex culture. The tar proves that they also invented the world’s first glue, a feat previously attributed to anatomically modern humans.

Not only did Neanderthals beat humans to this high-tech skill, but they created up to three sophisticated ways to process tar from birch bark.^[1] Each produced different amounts, which was smart. A Neanderthal hunter, quickly needing to fix a weapon, could choose the fastest technique that made the least.

Homo sapiens, on the other hand, began using adhesives only 70,000 years ago. While these early Africans probably invented glue independently, it is quite plausible that they could have learned the birch bark techniques from Neanderthals.

9 Library Of Languages

Religious manuscripts are nothing new, but those at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt have pedigree. They belong to one of the world’s oldest operational libraries. Among Saint Catherine’s thousands of books were about 130 manuscripts known as palimpsests. A palimpsest was a manuscript with its original pages erased and written over.

During the seventh century, Saint Catherine’s did so out of necessity. The spread of Islam throughout the Sinai Desert isolated the monks. When paper became scarce, they reused the older books. Starting in 2011, some 6,800 pages from palimpsests were photographed in special light to reveal the invisible words.

The manuscripts delivered. The recovered literature was dated between the 4th to the 12th centuries. Astonishing finds from known languages included 108 pages of new Greek poems and the oldest recipe credited to Hippocrates, the Greek physician.

Even more priceless were the rare, extinct languages of Caucasian Albanian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic. The discovery helped broaden the scant vocabulary of Caucasian Albanian, known from only a few stone inscriptions and once spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan.^[2]

8 Monte Kronio

Remnants of mankind’s love affair with alcohol litter archaeological sites. Jars and equipment containing traces of ancient wine are not uncommon. In this case, US researchers were spelunking in Italy when they found brewers’ pots in a cave.

The dull containers were quite large, but nothing about them hinted that they were about to tweak Italy’s wine history. Tests identified tartaric acid and its sodium salt on the inside, something that grapes carry naturally and release during winemaking.

The ground-shifting element is the age of the pots’ location.^[3] Monte Kronio, off the coast of Sicily, is a site from the Copper Age (early fourth millennium BC). Conventional belief dated the beginning of winemaking on the Italian peninsula to the Middle Bronze Age. Considering that this was around 1300–1100 BC, the leap is quite a dramatic one.

7 Etruscan Boat Bees

A dead bee does not sound like much, but honeybees found in an ancient Etruscan workshop had a surprising story to share. Around 2,500 years ago, the building burned down in Milan, Italy. After archaeologists opened the workshop in 2017, they found flame-warped honeycombs, carbonized bees, and honey-related products.

Tests extracted a surprise. The honey produced was a unique variety derived from semi-wild grapevines. The insects also fed on water lilies and other aquatic plants. Some of the pollen belonged to plants not even native to the area. The far-off nectar and watery nature of the plants meant that the bees had reached their feeding grounds by boat.^[4]

This revealed the remarkable beekeeping skills of the Etruscans and also provided the first physical evidence for an ancient report. Four centuries after the shop collapsed, Pliny the Elder, the Roman scholar, wrote about the honey farmers of Ostiglia 32 kilometers (20 mi) away.

Pliny described how villagers ferried hives far upstream during the night. When dawn broke, the honeybees left the boats and returned later in the day. Once the hives arrived back in Ostiglia, the villagers gathered the honey.

6 The Tel Tsaf Silo

The shift when society became unequal may have been found in a small clay object. Tel Tsaf in Israel’s Jordan Valley was a prehistoric village that existed around 5200–4700 BC. In 2015, a clay vessel surfaced. The unique artifact appeared to be a miniature replica of large silos nearby, of which only the bases remained.

During this period, scholars once believed that everybody had roughly the same amount of livestock and that food stored in the home met each family’s yearly needs. In other words, society was equal. But the huge number of silos here meant that grain was being gathered in a different way for different reasons.

The model silo, which was found with other ritual artifacts, could indicate that food storage in Tel Tsaf occurred with political and religious elements. The silos were a means to accumulate wealth and not in equal measures for everyone.

Surplus grain would have ensured that somebody had more power, currency, and influence. The 7,200-year-old tiny silo forces experts to reconsider how prehistoric society organized itself.^[5]

5 Arrival Of Australian Aborigines

Art crayons and stone axes make for an odd couple. But under normal circumstances, they are nothing to write home about. When the artifacts were found at the Madjedbebe shelter in Australia’s Northern Territory, they were anything but normal. These are the world’s oldest ochre crayons and stone axes.

The age of the collection is what is changing Australia’s human history. Its first nation, the Australian Aborigines, remains the most ancient civilization in existence today. They were also the creators of the newly discovered tools.

Previously, the general time frame for when they first came ashore was around 47,000–60,000 years ago. The Madjedbebe toolkit proves that the Aboriginal people arrived up to 18,000 years earlier, had a higher level of toolmaking than previously thought, and lived with some of Australia’s extinct megafauna.^[6]

The repercussions go beyond the continent. Another big debate concerns the departure of humans from Africa. The time proposed for this event falls somewhere between 60,000–100,000 years ago. The newly dated tools shorten the lower end of that bracket to 65,000 years.

4 Extinct Architecture

Usually, archaeologists don’t waste time on holes in rocks. But when the holes are clearly ancient and man-made, things get interesting. Artificial holes came to light when archaeologists investigated the west bank of the Nile River.

Located in central Sudan, the mysterious dents were drilled as far back as 5000 BC. Whoever produced the cavities used an unknown method without metal and placed them at a height of 1.3–3.2 meters (4.3–10.5 ft) in granite walls.^[7]

The sheer effort of the task would have been immense and called for a long-term commitment. The cylindrical shapes were smooth on the inside, measured 4–5 centimeters (1.6–2.0 in) in diameter, and tapered down to a point.

During a hypothetical attempt to reconstruct the unknown architecture based on the holes and data from the surrounding area, the results suggested a shelter-type structure made with wooden poles. The design brought stability to the homes by anchoring one end of the support beams within the holes.

The unusual features and effort that went into their creation revealed the ingenuity of a group who was most likely settling permanently next to the Nile.

3 Origins Of Peruvian Culture

For decades, the roots of Peru’s complex ancient civilizations remained hidden. Experts cannot agree if they emerged with farmers from the highlands or the coastal communities.

A recent study suggests that Peru’s amazing cultures were born near the sea. A six-year excavation at the ruins of Huaca Prieta in coastal Peru partially focused on what most consider a boring subject—baskets.

They were woven by hand nearly 15,000 years ago and are among the oldest found in the New World. As such, they offer a valuable look into the cultural aspects of these early inhabitants of Peru. One might expect practical, plain baskets, but what archaeologists found were groundbreaking.

Instead of simple crafts, they encountered fashion statements made with unexpected effort and skill.^[8] Weavers used a huge range of materials, including dyed cotton that needed complicated preparation beforehand. The baskets’ bling was symptomatic of a highly developed society in Huaca Prieta not considered before.

Other discoveries at the site support the notion that culture boomed along the coast at a rapid pace, including specialized tools for deep-sea fishing, textiles, flourishing crops, and religion.

2 Plimpton 322

In the early 1900s, an unassuming clay tablet was unearthed in what is now Iraq. The surface of the tablet was divided into four columns filled with cuneiform script. The 3,700-year-old Babylonian artifact carried a number pattern called Pythagorean triples.

For almost a century, mathematicians could not understand why Plimpton 322 was created. What was the reason behind this record where the complex numbers had to be calculated in a time-consuming manner?

In 2017, scientists found the tablet’s purpose. It turned out to be the world’s most accurate trigonometric table. Remarkably, it also predated the Greeks’ invention of trigonometry by over a millennium.^[9]

Apart from stealing the first trigonometry prize, Plimpton 322 displays a new, ingenious approach to this mathematical field by using ratios rather than circles and angles to describe right-angle triangles. It is simpler but more effective than today’s system.

The discovery also disproved the previous belief that the tablet was simply a teacher’s sheet to check students’ math results. Instead, Plimpton 322 was powerful enough to assist with building major architectural feats such as palaces and pyramids.

1 Catholics At Jamestown

The English settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, were decidedly anti-Catholic. One reason for moving to the New World was to claim it for the Protestants. They even executed one of their leaders upon discovering that he was a Catholic spy. Clearly, it was dangerous to be a Catholic in Jamestown.

For this reason, archaeologists investigating the settlement found the many rosaries that they encountered to be somewhat confusing. The Church of England was a new concept, and some proposed that the rosaries were transitional relics between the old and the new belief systems.

In 2015, another discovery suggested the opposite—a previously unknown Catholic cell in Jamestown. Underneath the town’s Protestant church was the grave of Gabriel Archer. When he died sometime between 1608 and 1610, somebody placed a silver box on his coffin.

Sealed with rust, the hexagonal artifact risked damage if conventionally opened. Instead, CT scans revealed a collection inside that was common in Catholic burials. Called a reliquary, it contained bone fragments and a vial.

While nothing is definite, it is possible that Jamestown had hidden Catholics.^[10] The king of Spain desired the New World for the papacy and had spies everywhere in London. Jamestown had fortifications against a Spanish sea invasion, but perhaps the king intended to take over the colony from within.