Growing up in the United States, you learn about all the big, quintessentially “American” sites and structures from a very early age. You’re told that they are important and given a vague explanation of why. Then you set about the task of never really thinking about them again.

That’s a shame because they can be quite fascinating—usually for reasons that they were never meant to be. Behind the stately columns and torches lies an entire world of weirdness hidden away from the public eye.

10 The Washington Mini Monument

The Washington Monument, the giant white obelisk in Washington, DC, was built in honor of the first US president, George Washington. You probably knew that. What you may not have known is that the monument has a forgotten baby brother.

Buried beneath an unassuming manhole right beside the famous landmark is a 3.7-meter-tall (12 ft) replica. Placed there in the 1880s, around the same time that the Washington Monument was finished, this shrunken clone served as a “Geodetic Control Point” for the National Geodetic Survey (NGS).^[1]

Officially named “Bench Mark A,” it was basically used as an exceptionally accurate starting point when making maps and planning railroad routes. However, due to its proximity to the monument, the NGS employees decided to dress it up a bit rather than use the standard plain metal rods.

Unfortunately, the miniature monument has sunk into DC’s marshy soil over the years. So it was given a proper burial. It was entombed in a brick chimney and sealed off from the world. It continues to sink about 0.5 millimeters (0.02 in) each year.

9 The Capitol’s Flag Factory

Aside from being your typical stately government building, the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, offers a special service: For a small fee, you can own an American flag that has been flown over the Capitol. So, if you wish to own a flag that is slightly more America-y than your neighbor’s, you’re welcome.

But before you reach for your wallet, there’s just one thing. The flag you receive will indeed have been flown over the Capitol, but only on one of three tiny, hidden flagpoles for 30 seconds.

Since its inception in 1937, the Capitol Flag Program (CFP) has supplied patriotic citizens with genuine “Capitol-flown” flags. However, when demand eventually outgrew supply, the CFP had to get creative. Rather than continue to sell the prominently displayed flags above the Capitol’s entrances, they just installed a bizarre “flag factory” on the roof.

Three unremarkable flagpoles, complete with a small service elevator and crew of workers, are used to fly as many flags for the state-mandated 30 seconds as possible each day. Security cameras have even been installed to prevent workers from flying the flags for a disgustingly disrespectful 29 seconds.^[2]

8 The Golden Gate Bridge-Boat-Tunnel Thing

While it isn’t a really a national monument, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is still a world-famous symbol of American ingenuity. However, this bright orange engineering marvel came dangerously close to not existing. San Francisco almost built a tunnel instead. Stranger still, they almost built a tunnel designed by a man who had presumably no idea what a tunnel actually was.

When shopping around for ideas about how to span San Francisco Bay in the early 1930s, city officials were delivered an unusual proposal by local inventor Cleve F. Shaffer. His eccentric concept called for two bridges to be built—one from each shore—which would each connect to its own ship floating stationary in the bay. A tunnel would run between the ships, which would be raised and lowered to allow sea traffic in and out of the city.^[3]

Aside from the fever-dream design, the problems introduced by the plan were many. The narrow spiral ramps within the bridge-ships would create nightmarish traffic jams. In addition, the fact that most of the bridge was freely floating was a recipe for maritime disaster.

Tempted by the relatively low price tag, the city of San Francisco came bafflingly close to accepting this design before settling on their now world-famous suspension bridge.

7 The Supreme Basketball Court

The “Highest Court of the Land” is a title that has long been held by the US Supreme Court. It is well-deserved, albeit in a metaphorical sense. A more literal example would be the secret basketball court which sits just above the courtroom.

Once used as a storage area for journals and other legal documents, the fifth floor of the Washington, DC, Supreme Court building was converted into an all-purpose workout area for off-duty employees in the 1940s. At some point, the focus shifted to basketball and a slightly smaller-than-regulation basketball court was constructed.

In recent years, justices such as Byron White and William H. Rehnquist have shot hoops there to blow off steam. Sandra Day O’Connor used it to host women-only yoga classes. A weight-lifting area even caters to justices looking to strengthen their cores.^[4]

Unfortunately, this court is off-limits to the public. As it sits just above the courtroom on the fourth floor, there are strict rules in place. Signs warn visitors not to play when court is in session because squeaky sneakers can really blow your concentration when deciding the legal fate of millions.

6 The Disturbing Vision Behind the National Parks

Many people are aware that Theodore Roosevelt founded the US Forest Service and more or less created the concept of a “national park.” However, most people don’t know that he had help—from some of the most distressingly racist people on the planet. They saw national parks as an opportunity to prove the importance of racial purification.

These men were Madison Grant, Gifford Pinchot, and a handful of other aristocratic supporters of eugenics, the belief that some creatures—including humans—are genetically superior to others. They were fond of warning of the impending “race suicide” that America would face if it didn’t replenish its stock of white people and even suggested that certain people should be legally forbidden to reproduce.^[5]

However, they were also very vocal about the importance of wildlife conservation. When Roosevelt approached them for help in establishing the national parks, they saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Essentially, their idea was to use the parks as a metaphor for human society—the noble bear and elk (white people) deprived of land and resources by weaker but more numerous species (nonwhites). Luckily, the message was lost in translation and now we just like looking at all the pretty trees.

5 Crazy Horse’s Ironic Insult

In 1948, sculptor Korczazk Ziolkowski began work on possibly the most ambitious statue in the world. Using the very mountains of South Dakota’s Black Hills, he planned to honor Native American folk hero Crazy Horse with a massive memorial, the largest on the planet. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to consult any actual Native Americans before starting work.

Aside from the fact that Ziolkowski began unknowingly blowing apart a sacred mountain with no permission whatsoever, the statue itself has proven problematic as well. The plan calls for Crazy Horse, mounted on horseback, to be pointing dramatically across the land.

This is a reference to a folktale in which a white man asks, “Where are your lands now?” The legendary warrior replies, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” It makes for a moving image. But there’s one small problem: It is unbelievably rude to point in Native American culture.^[6]

Needless to say, Native American spokesmen have been condemning the statue for decades, comparing it to a Mount Rushmore that features the presidents picking their noses. Luckily, the statue is not yet finished. Here’s hoping that someone takes over soon who is willing to actually speak to the people being honored.

4 The National Mall’s Dodged Bullet

The National Mall in Washington, DC, is absolutely packed with monuments to great Americans and moments in American history. The Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, and the Lincoln Memorial all call this long, grassy stretch home. However, in the early 1920s, it came dangerously close to adopting a new monument, seemingly praising one of the darkest moments in the nation’s history.

Having only been abolished half a century prior, slavery was still an extremely tender topic during the early years of the 20th century. This is exactly why the “Mammy Monument” was so baffling.

Proposed by North Carolina Congressman Charles Stedman in 1923, this statue featured a large slave woman holding a white infant. It was to be a memorial to slaves who “desired no change in their condition of life.”^[7]

Understandably, in an era in which many white Americans were still struggling to decide if freeing the slaves had been the right move, a monument to slaves that looked upon slavery “as the happy golden hours of their lives” might have been problematic.

Nevertheless, the Senate approved the proposal, nearly constructing the statue ironically close to the Lincoln Memorial. However, overwhelming backlash ultimately caused the project to be canceled.

3 Lincoln’s Cave Drawings

Speaking of the Lincoln Memorial, it isn’t immune to Hidden Historical Weirdness Syndrome (HHWS), either. Like other HHWS sufferers, Lincoln’s famous shrine hides its secrets well. Only a select few ever get to see it, but there is a man-made cavern full of modern cave paintings hiding just beneath Abe’s massive throne.

During the monument’s construction in the naturally swampy Washington, DC, terrain, workers had to dig down 12 meters (40 ft) to hit anything solid enough to build on. Then they poured several concrete pillars to support the weight of the memorial. This inadvertently created a huge artificial cave system beneath the structure. In the years following its 1922 completion, it even began growing stalactites.

But the truly bizarre bits are the cave drawings—charcoal graffiti left by bored workmen over 100 years ago. Perfectly preserved in their sealed tomb, intricate illustrations of dogs, horses, flapper girls, and men smoking pipes stare from the giant columns supporting Honest Abe.

Plastic sheets have been placed to protect a few of these drawings, but most are still exactly as they were left a century ago. Tentative plans are in place to open this otherworldly time capsule to the public in the near future.^[8]

2 The Roosevelt Geyser

Today, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial sits on a quiet island in the Potomac River in Washington, DC. In honor of the 26th president’s love of nature and conservation, it largely consists of a simple park. However, upon Roosevelt’s death in 1919, proposals for a memorial began pouring in, and the current design was nowhere near the most likely.

At first, officials were drawn to a plan put forth by architect John Russell Pope. On the southern banks of DC’s tidal basin—home of the Jefferson Memorial—a fountain would be constructed in honor of Roosevelt’s spirit, which “sprang out of the deep sources of the nation’s history.” However, this would be no ordinary fountain. Larger than life, like Roosevelt himself, this fountain would blast water to a staggering 61 meters (200 ft), twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial.^[9]

Obviously, the man-made geyser idea never saw the light of day. Not only did many agree that it was too soon to build a memorial to the only one-year-deceased president, but the irony wasn’t lost on the public. After all, was such a monumental waste of water really the best way to honor the greatest conservationist in history?

1 Lady Liberty’s Makeover

New York City’s Statue of Liberty is far and away the most powerful symbol of the United States. Instantly recognizable the world over, this (now) green behemoth has welcomed ships to NYC since 1886. But bizarrely, her iconic look was not her first one—she was originally a Muslim woman.

Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s designer, had first planned to build the colossal statue/lighthouse for the opening of Egypt’s Suez Canal. She was to be a fellah (“Arab peasant”) clad in a simple Middle Eastern robe.

Entitled Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, she would represent the Egyptians, her torch lighting the way for the rest of the world. However, after throwing obscene amounts of cash at the canal project itself, the Egyptian government passed on the costly—and entirely cosmetic—statue.

But Bartholdi was determined to bring his vision to life. So when the French government approached him to design a monument for the US for its centennial celebration, he jumped at the chance. After swapping her Muslim robe for a more Roman number and changing her official name to Liberty Enlightening the World, Bartholdi presented the United States with his now world-famous creation.^[10]

For almost 400 years, the Ottoman Empire dominated Southeastern Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East. Founded by daring Turkic horsemen, the empire soon lost much of its original vitality, settling into a curious state of functional dysfunction that hid all kinds of dark secrets.

10Fratricide

The early Ottoman sultans didn’t practice primogeniture, where the eldest son inherits everything. As a result, various brothers sometimes claimed the throne and the early days of the empire were plagued by pretenders, who tended to take refuge in enemy states and cause trouble for years. When Mehmed the Conqueror besieged Constantinople, his own uncle fought against him from the walls.

Mehmed dealt with the problem with his customary ruthlessness. When he took the throne, he had most of his male relatives executed, including an infant brother strangled in his crib. Later, he issued his infamous law: “And to whomsoever of my sons the Sultanate shall pass, it is fitting that for the order of the world he shall kill his brothers. Most of the Ulema allow this. So let them act on this.”

From that point on, each new sultan had to take the throne by killing all his male relatives. Mehmed III tore out his beard with grief when his young brother begged him for mercy. But he “answered never a word,” and the boy was executed along with 18 other brothers. The sight of their 19 shrouded bodies rolling through the streets was said to have moved all Istanbul to tears.

Even after the initial round of murders, the sultan’s relatives weren’t safe. Suleiman the Magnificent watched silently from behind a screen while his own son was strangled with a bowstring; the boy had become too popular with the army for the sultan to feel secure.

9The Cage

The policy of fratricide was never popular with the public or the clergy, and it was quietly abandoned when Ahmed I suddenly died in 1617. Instead, potential heirs to the throne were confined in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in special apartments known as the kafes (“the cage”).

A prince of the Ottoman Empire might spend his whole life imprisoned in the kafes, monitored constantly by guards. The imprisonment was usually luxurious but strictly enforced, and many a prince went mad from boredom or else became debauched and dependent on alcohol. When a new sultan was taken to the Gate of Felicity to receive the allegiance of the viziers, it might be the first time he had been outside in decades, which wasn’t ideal preparation for a ruler.

The threat of execution was constant. In 1621, the Grand Mufti refused to allow Osman II to have his brother strangled. But the chief judge of the Balkans was rushed in to give a counter opinion, and the prince was strangled anyway. Osman himself was later overthrown by the military, who had to extricate his surviving brother from the kafes by pulling the roof off and hauling him out with a rope. The poor man had been two days without food or water and was probably too insane to notice that he had become sultan.

8The Palace Was A Silent Hell

Even for the sultan, life in the Topkapi could be stifling in the extreme. It was considered unseemly for the sultan to speak too much, so a form of sign language was introduced and the ruler spent most of his day surrounded by complete silence. Mustafa I found this impossible to bear and tried to have it banned, but his viziers refused to allow it. Mustafa soon went insane and was seen throwing coins into the sea for the fish to spend.

Palace intrigue was endemic as viziers, courtiers, and eunuchs jockeyed for power. For 130 years, the women of the harem gained great influence and the period became known as “the sultanate of women.” The dragoman (chief interpreter) was always powerful and always a Greek. The eunuchs split along racial lines, and the Chief Black Eunuch and Chief White Eunuch were often fierce rivals.

Caught in the middle of this madness, the sultan was watched everywhere he went. Ahmet III wrote to his grand vizier complaining that “If I go to one of the rooms, 40 pages are lined up; if I have to put on my trousers, I do not feel the least comfort, so the sword-bearer has to dismiss them, keeping only three or four men so that I may be at ease.” Spending their days in total silence, constantly watched, in such a poisonous atmosphere, a number of the later Ottoman sultans became mentally ill.

7Executions

The Ottoman government held the power of life and death over its subjects, and it wasn’t afraid to use it. The first court of the Topkapi Palace, where petitioners and visitors had to gather, was a terrifying place. It featured two pillars where severed heads were displayed and a special fountain solely for executioners to wash their hands. During the periodic palace purges, mounds of tongues might be piled up in the first court while a special cannon boomed every time a body was thrown into the sea.

The Ottomans didn’t bother to create a corps of executioners. Instead, the job strangely fell to the palace gardeners, who split their time between murder and creating many of the delightful flowers we know today. Most of their victims were simply beheaded. But it was forbidden to spill the blood of royalty and high-ranking officials, so they had to be strangled instead. As a result, the head gardener was always a huge, muscular man capable of choking a vizier to death at a moment’s notice.

In the early days of the empire, the sultan’s officials prided themselves on their obedience to his whims and it was customary for them to face execution with quiet grace. The famous vizier Kara Mustafa was much respected for greeting his executioner with a humble “So be it” and kneeling for the cord to loop around his neck.

In later years, standards slipped. In fact, the 19th-century governor Ali Pasha fought so hard against the sultan’s men that he had to be shot dead through the floorboards of his house.

6The Death Race

But there was one way for a loyal official to escape the sultan’s wrath. Beginning in the late 18th century, it became the custom that a condemned grand vizier could escape his fate by beating the head gardener in a race through the palace gardens.

The official would be summoned to a meeting with the head gardener and after exchanging greetings, the vizier would be handed a cup of iced sherbet. If it was white, the sultan had granted him a reprieve. If it was red, he was to be executed. As soon as he saw the red sherbet, the vizier would start sprinting.

The vizier would sprint through the palace gardens, darting between shady cypress trees and rows of tulips, presumably watched by hidden eyes behind grated harem windows. The goal was the Fish Market Gate on the other side of the palace. If the vizier reached the gate before the head gardener, he would merely be exiled. But the head gardener was younger and stronger, and he would usually be waiting with his silk cord.

Still, a few viziers did make it, including Haci Salih Pasha, the last vizier to face a death race. He was widely congratulated and later became a provincial governor.

5The Mob

Despite being theoretically second only to the sultan, grand viziers tended to be executed or thrown to the mob as a scapegoat whenever anything went wrong. Selim the Grim went through so many grand viziers that they began carrying a will with them at all times. One begged Selim to let him know in advance if he was to be executed, only for the sultan to cheerfully respond that he was already lining up a replacement.

The viziers also had to placate the people of Istanbul, who were prone to marching on the palace and demanding executions whenever anything went wrong. An 18th-century British visitor observed that “when a minister here displeases the people, in three hours time he is dragged even from his master’s arms [and] they cut off his hands, head, and feet.”

Not that the people were afraid to storm the palace if their demands weren’t met. In 1730, a ragged soldier named Patrona Ali led a mob into the palace and effectively took control of the empire for several months. He was stabbed to death after trying to make a butcher who had lent him money ruler of Wallachia.

4The Harem

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of the Topkapi palace was the Imperial Harem. This consisted of up to 2,000 women, most of them bought or abducted as slaves, who served as the sultan’s wives and concubines. They were kept cloistered deep in the seraglio, and for a man to look upon them meant instant death. The harem itself was guarded and managed by the Chief Black Eunuch, who eventually leveraged the position into one of the most powerful offices in the empire.

Conditions in the harem itself presumably varied, although little information is available about events within its walls. It was said that there were so many concubines that some might barely set eyes on the sultan. Others managed to gain influence over the running of the empire. Suleiman the Magnificent fell madly in love with a Pole called Roxelana, married her, and made her a key adviser.

Roxelana’s influence was such that a grand vizier sent the pirate Barbarossa on a desperate mission to kidnap the Italian beauty Giulia Gonzaga in the belief that she alone would be a match for Roxelana’s charms. The plan was foiled by a brave Italian, who burst into Giulia’s bedroom and got her onto a horse just before the pirates arrived. After thanking the man profusely for saving her, Giulia supposedly had him stabbed to death for seeing her in her nightgown, a deed which won her the admiration of all Italy.

Kosem Sultan achieved even more influence than Roxelana, effectively running the empire as regent for her son and grandson. But she met her match in her daughter-in-law Turhan, who had Kosem chased down and strangled with a curtain before taking her place as regent.

3The Boy Tribute

One of the most notorious features of early Ottoman rule was the devsirme (“collection”), a tribute of young boys from the empire’s Christian subjects. Most of the boys were enrolled in the Janissary Corps, the army of slave-soldiers who were at the forefront of the Ottoman conquests. The tribute was carried out irregularly whenever the empire felt it might need the manpower and usually targeted boys aged 12–14 from Greece and the Balkans.

Ottoman officials would summon all the boys in the village and check their names against the baptismal records from the local church. They would then select the strongest, perhaps taking one boy from every 40 households. The boys would then be grouped together and marched to Istanbul, with the weakest dropping dead along the way. The Ottomans produced a detailed description of each boy so that they could be tracked down if they escaped.

In Istanbul, the boys were circumcised and forcibly converted to Islam. The most handsome or intelligent were sent to the palace, where they were trained to join the imperial elite. These boys could aspire to reach the very highest ranks, and many became pashas or viziers, like the famed Croatian grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed.

The rest of the boys joined the Janissaries. First, they were sent to work on a farm for eight years, where they learned Turkish and gained strength. In their twenties, they formally became Janissaries, the elite soldiers of the empire who were subject to iron discipline and indoctrination.

There were exceptions to the tribute. It was forbidden to take a family’s only child or the children of men who had served in the military. Orphans were off-limits for some reason as were the untrustworthy Hungarians. The citizens of Istanbul were also excluded on the grounds that they “did not have a sense of shame.” The tribute system died out in the early 18th century when the children of Janissaries were allowed to become Janissaries and the corps became self-sustaining.

2Slavery

Although the devsirme had died out by the 17th century, slavery remained a key feature of the Ottoman system until the end of the 19th century. As time went on, most slaves came from Africa or from the Caucasus (Circassians were particularly prized), while the Crimean Tartar raiders provided a steady flow of Russians, Ukrainians, and even Poles. Muslims couldn’t be legally enslaved, but that rule was quietly forgotten whenever supplies of non-Muslims dried up.

In his classic Race And Slavery In The Middle East, the scholar Bernard Lewis argued that Islamic slavery developed largely independently of Western slavery and therefore had a number of key differences. For example, it was somewhat easier for Ottoman slaves to gain their freedom or attain positions of power. Ottoman apologists also like to claim that it was less racist, treating white and black slaves alike, a claim that is somewhat undercut by the writings of the actual black people who lived under Ottoman rule.

But there is no question that Ottoman slavery was an incredibly brutal system. Millions of people died in slave raids or were worked to death in the fields. That’s not even getting into the castration process used to create eunuchs. As Lewis pointed out, the Ottomans imported millions of slaves from Africa but very few people of African descent remain in modern Turkey today. That alone tells a story.

1Massacres

On the whole, the Ottomans were a rather tolerant empire. Aside from the devsirme, they made no real attempt to convert their non-Muslim subjects and welcomed the Jews with open arms after they were expelled from Spain. They never discriminated against their subject peoples, and the empire was practically run by Albanians and Greeks. But when the Ottomans themselves felt threatened, they could turn very ugly.

Selim the Grim, for example, was very alarmed by the Shia, who denied his authority as defender of Islam and could be double agents for Persia. As a result, he marched across the east of the empire, slaughtering at least 40,000 Shia and driving countless more from their homes. When the Greeks first began to press for independence, the Ottomans turned matters over to their Albanian irregulars, who cheerfully committed a number of terrible massacres.

As the empire declined, it lost much of its old tolerance, growing more and more vicious toward its minorities. By the 19th century, massacres were growing increasingly common. This famously reached its terrifying climax in 1915 when the empire, just two years from collapse, orchestrated the massacre of as much as 75 percent of its Armenian population. Some 1.5 million people died in the Armenian Genocide, an atrocity that Turkey still refuses to fully acknowledge.

In 1547, Grand Prince Ivan of Moscow declared himself tsar of Russia. He is now better known as Ivan the Terrible. For almost 400 years, the tsars ruled one of the largest empires in history, stretching across forest and steppe. Opaque and brutal, the mighty Russian Empire hid all sorts of dark secrets.

10The Wild East

Not too long after Columbus discovered America, the Russians began colonizing Siberia. The initial expansion was driven by merchants like the powerful Stroganov family, who were hungry for priceless furs.

Their agents were Cossack mercenaries who expanded Russian power with extraordinary cruelty. When the Sakha chief Dzhenik revolted, he was skinned alive and then his baby son was suffocated with the skin. The Aleut Islanders attacked tax collectors in 1764, so the Russians burned 18 villages and massacred hundreds.

Germs were even more effective than Russian guns and steel. The isolated Siberians were almost as unprepared for European diseases as their distant cousins in the Americas. In the 17th century, smallpox killed over 50 percent of many Siberian tribes. Among the Sakha and Evenk, the death rate was at least 80 percent. The Aleut population dropped from 20,000 to under 5,000 in less than two generations.

9Torture

The Russian emperors often resorted to cruel tortures to shore up their power. Ivan the Terrible was known for roasting his enemies alive in a giant skillet, which he had made specially. This apparently started a trend since some Cossacks complained in 1640 that a provincial official had been roasting them in huge pans as well as “pulling out their veins.”

The Empress Elizabeth was fond of having tongues ripped out with pliers. Peter the Great preferred the knout, a brutal leather whip that sliced 1.3 centimeters (0.5 in) into the flesh with every blow. Peter also personally supervised prisoners being stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons.

Under Catherine the Great, rebels were suspended by a metal hook pushed through their ribs and left to die. Others were hanged on rafts, which floated down the Volga as a warning.

8The Court Was Brutally Violent

Theoretically, the Russian tsar was perhaps the most absolute ruler in Europe with the noble boyars as the only real check on his power. In practice, the Russian court tended to be a snake pit, with competing factions often resorting to violence to gain power.

As a child, Peter the Great huddled terrified in a corner while armed men rampaged through the palace massacring his mother’s relatives. Ivan the Terrible was sure that boyars had poisoned his mother when he was just eight.

They were relatively lucky. Feodor II lasted seven weeks on the throne before he was strangled. Peter III was murdered on the orders of his own wife, who ruled for 30 years as Catherine the Great. Paul I was throttled and kicked to death in his bedroom. One of the assassins then woke up Paul’s son with the words, “Time to grow up. Go and rule!”

Little wonder that many tsars became paranoid and cruel. Peter the Great had his own son flogged to death. Ivan the Terrible also killed his son during an argument.

7The Imprisonment Of Ivan VI

Ivan VI became tsar in 1740 when he was just two months old. He was overthrown a year later by his cousin Elizabeth. On her orders, Ivan was placed in solitary confinement at age four. He remained there for 20 years.

For most of that time, he was kept in the Schlusselburg Fortress, where nobody even knew who he was. His cell had no windows, so he never saw daylight and “never knew whether it was day or night.” The guards were forbidden to speak to him. His only entertainment was a copy of the Bible.

Unsurprisingly, Ivan developed mental problems. He remained locked in his room at Schlusselburg until 1764 when Catherine the Great took pity on him and had him murdered.

6The Oprichniki

After a troubled childhood, Ivan the Terrible became increasingly deranged after a period of illness and the death of his wife. Turning against the powerful boyars, Ivan surrounded himself with a group of mercenaries and commoners who were given land grants around Moscow.

These were the notorious Oprichniki, who dressed all in black and carried severed dog heads as a symbol of the fate that awaited traitors. They acted as Ivan’s secret police, torturing and executing anyone suspected of disloyalty to Ivan.

In 1570, the Oprichniki stormed into the city of Novgorod and massacred over 10,000 of its citizens. The once mighty trading town never truly recovered.

5Impostors

The Russian Empire was oddly afflicted by impostors, who usually claimed to be a deceased member of the royal family. During the “Time of Troubles” in the early 17th century, no fewer than three impostors emerged and claimed to be Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitri, who had died as a child.

False Dimitri I even managed to be crowned tsar in Moscow, although he was soon murdered. False Dimitri II was essentially impersonating False Dimitri I and gathered a vast Cossack army that ravaged the north. False Dimitri III was called the “Thief of Pskov” after taking that city, but he was defeated and executed in 1612.

In the 18th century, the Cossack Pugachev orchestrated a huge revolt by claiming to be the murdered Peter III. Another False Peter turned up in Montenegro, which he ruled for five years until the Ottomans paid a barber to cut his throat. At least three other Russians also claimed to be Peter, including a founder of the Skoptsy sect.

4Cults And Sects

The Russian Church was intense and prone to schism, and it seemed that sects and cults flourished everywhere in the vast Russian Empire. The Khlysty were known for their frantic singing and dancing and were said to wildly whip themselves to show contempt for their physical bodies.

The Molokane (“Milk Drinkers”) refused to serve in the military and tried to establish pacifist communes in Siberia. The Doukhobors (“Spirit Wrestlers”) preferred their Living Book of hymns to the Bible.

Strangest of all were the Skoptsy, who considered sex the source of all sin and practiced ritual castration and genital mutilation. Male Skoptsy would slice off their testicles and cauterize the wound with a hot iron. Others went further and hacked off their penises as well.

Female Skoptsy were expected to slice off their breasts or nipples, and some form of female circumcision was practiced as well. The Skoptsy also castrated their young children, so the sect only survived by converting new recruits. It lasted over a century.

3Self-Immolation

The largest Russian religious split came under Peter the Great, when Patriarch Nikon undertook reforms to bring the Russian church into line with the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Among other things, he decreed that the Russians should make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. Led by the Archpriest Avvakum, many Russians refused to accept this.

Calling themselves the Old Believers, these traditionalists held services in secret where they crossed themselves with three fingers. The state called them Raskolniki (“Splitters”) and persecuted them relentlessly. Many Old Believers came to believe that the end of the world was at hand. If they suspected they had been discovered, whole villages would gather together, set fire to the church, and burn themselves alive.

2Famines

The Russian Empire was never noted for its efficiency, and its rulers often struggled to respond to the periodic famines that were a feature of life in the provinces. As late as 1891, the tsar responded to widespread crop failures by forbidding newspapers to report on the problem or even use the word “famine.”

After much foot-dragging, he eventually banned crop exports and attempted a program of famine relief. As a result, “only” about 400,000 people died in the famine of 1891–92.

There were worse examples. In 1601, a volcano erupted in Peru and sparked a series of unusually long winters. The resulting famine killed two million Russians, one-third of the population at the time. The tsar was too busy with a looming civil war to do much. “Dead bodies were found with hay in their mouths, and human flesh was sold in pies in the markets.”

1Serfdom

The Russian Empire was built on the backs of the serfs, who were bound to a particular estate and forced to work for the landowner who controlled it. By the 17th century, landowners were allowed to buy and sell serfs, effectively making them indistinguishable from slaves.

Nobles were not technically allowed to kill their serfs, but they could flog or punish them as they saw fit. There were no real consequences if a serf died of his injuries. Landowners could also send their serfs to Siberia or enlist them in the army against their will.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861. At that point, Russia had a population of almost 63 million, at least 46 million of them serfs.

The Maya are perhaps one of the world’s most successful and brilliant civilizations. Thanks to the hard work of dedicated researchers and archaeologists, many secrets of this once-powerful civilization are now starting to unravel.

10 Recipe For Maya Blue

The Maya considered a certain shade of blue to be a highly significant color. Known as Maya Blue, this color was used to cover pots, palace walls, and codices. In addition, it was also used to cover the bodies of human sacrifices. Though scientists knew the two main ingredients of Maya Blue were indigo and palygorskite, they were at loss as to what the mysterious third ingredient was.

In 2008, US researchers published a study claiming that copal resin was the third secret ingredient of Maya Blue. However, a 2013 study refuted this claim. According to the researchers, their analyses revealed that the third secret ingredient is dehydroindigo and not copal resin. In addition, they suggested that the Maya knew “how to obtain the desired hue by varying the preparation temperature.”

9 Mayan Life Force Ceremony

One of the central beliefs of the Maya was that each person possessed a life force. Most importantly, they believed that this life force was a source of nourishment for the gods. Just recently, a team of researchers discovered that the Maya conducted a ceremony associated with this life force.

The ceremony was quite gruesome. Using arrowheads made from a type of volcanic glass called obsidian, the Maya would cut a person’s genitals, tongue, or earlobes and then let the blood spill out. They believed that by performing this ritual, they were “feeding the gods with the human essential life force.” Though this ceremony was brutal, the participants were likely volunteers, and they probably survived the painful ordeal.

8 Sustainable Technology

The ancient Mayan city of Tikal was located in a region where for four months every year, the skies would dry up and no rain would fall. Despite this, Tikal flourished for hundreds of years. In fact, in AD 700, this ancient Mayan city was home to approximately 80,000 people. So how did this metropolis survive the regular droughts?

Archaeologists have just recently discovered that the residents of Tikal used “a surprisingly sustainable system of water delivery.” In order to store rainwater from the eight-month wet season, the Maya constructed “a series of paved reservoirs.” The majority of these reservoirs could hold thousands of gallons of rainwater. In fact, the largest reservoir could store as much as 74 million liters (20 million gallons). The technology might have been simple, but it was sustainable, and it provided the Maya with a steady water supply during the yearly four-month droughts.

7 Ancient Royal Struggle

In 2013, a team of archaeologists unearthed a 1,500-year-old stone monument beneath a Mayan temple in Guatemala. This monument, which dated back to AD 564, detailed an ancient royal struggle between two Maya dynasties that lasted for seven years.

After deciphering the inscriptions, the researchers discovered that the monument was created in honor of a certain Maya king named Chak Took Ich’aak or “Red Spark Claw.” His death caused the political turmoil narrated in the stone monument. Ultimately, the struggle ended, and Chak Took Ich’aak’s son, King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin (“He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle”), took over the throne.

Experts considered this finding monumental since it provided the names of the Maya rulers during the sixth century. Before the discovery of the stone monument, no one knew their names.

6 Daily Lives Of The Maya Commoners

Also known as the “New World Pompeii,” the village of Ceren in El Salvador is considered to be “the best preserved ancient Maya village in all of Latin America.” This archaeological site was discovered by Professor Payson Sheets in 1978.

Aside from being the best preserved Mayan village in all of Latin America, Ceren also gave archaeologists a glimpse into the daily lives of the Maya commoners. Archaeological evidence discovered at the site showed that the residents of Ceren were not influenced or controlled by the ruling Maya elite. They were autonomous; they “had free reign regarding their architecture, crop selections, religious activities, and economics.” Significant decisions involving the community were made by the residents themselves.

This discovery is in stark contrast with some Mayan archaeological records, which state that the elites made the economic and political decisions for a particular region.

5 Primary Cause Of The Mayan Apocalypse

One of the most enduring mysteries involving the Mayan civilization is the cause of their demise. The Maya were a technologically advanced people. They had an excellent understanding of astronomy and mathematics, they built impressive cities, and “they used the only known written script in Mesoamerica.” But this advanced civilization mysteriously collapsed. Many theories have been proposed, such as invasion or civil war, but perhaps the most plausible was severe climate change.

Evidence points out that the Mayan civilization was hit by two severe droughts that lasted for decades. The first happened in the ninth century, and the second occurred in the 11th century. Archaeologists suggests that the ninth-century drought caused the collapse of Mayan cities located in the southern portion of the empire, while the 11th-century drought precipitated the demise of the northern cities.

4 Mayan Hieroglyphs

For years, researchers assumed that Mayan hieroglyphs were derived from the writing system of the Zapotecs, a pre-Columbian civilization that inhabited the Oaxaca valley south of Central Mexico. However, a set of newly discovered hieroglyphs suggested that the “Maya were writing at a complex level 150 years earlier than previously thought.”

Though the Mayans didn’t invent writing in the New World, the newly discovered writing system is a completely developed script, implying that the “Maya style [of writing] was not influenced by the Zapotecs.”

The hieroglyphs were found inside Las Pinturas, a pyramidal building located in San Bartolo, Guatemala. Unfortunately, researchers have not yet deciphered the newly found hieroglyphs despite the fact that it’s a “clearly developed written text.”

3 Toilets And Fountains

In 2009, a team of archaeologists released a study detailing how the Maya built fountains and toilets by controlling water pressure. This discovery refuted the widely held belief that the ability to generate water pressure in the New World only started after the arrival of Spanish colonizers.

The researchers arrived at this conclusion after investigating the unique and intricate system of water management located in the Mayan center of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. During its heyday, Palenque was inhabited by 6,000 people and was home to approximately 1,500 structures. It was called Lakamha or “Big Water” by the ancient Mayans due to the nine waterways, 56 springs, and hundreds of meters of cascades located in its vicinity.

After studying the city’s water management system, the researchers concluded that the Maya of Palenque “had water pressure technology by 750 AD at the very latest and most likely much earlier.”

2 The Mayan Sweat House

Even before the ancient Romans had their elaborate baths, the Maya had their humble sweat houses. In the early 2000s, a team of archaeologists led by Dr. Norman Hammond of Boston University discovered a mysterious structure at Cuello, northern Belize. For quite some time, the nature of the mysterious structure eluded them.

It was only by some sort of accident that they discovered that the building was a sweat house. After conducting further analysis, they found that the ancient Maya started using sweat houses as early as 900 BC or even much earlier.

So why did the Maya, who lived in a tropical environment, go to sweat houses regularly? According to the researchers, there were three possible reasons: First, the Maya used the sweat houses to cleanse their bodies. Second, they used them to get rid of certain illnesses. Third, the sweat houses were a way for them to communicate with the supernatural.

1 Monkey-Shaped Skull

The Maya played a fun but somewhat deadly sport that involved two opposing teams passing a ball using only their knees, hips, and elbows. What made this sport deadly was that the losing team could be sacrificed at the end of the game.

To protect themselves from injury and to make certain maneuvers easier, the players wore different types of clothing, including a hand guard worn around the wrists. Now, archaeologists have discovered a monkey-shaped skull, which they concluded was a representation of this particular hand guard.

The Maya believed that they would still play their ball game even after they died. To prepare them for this afterlife sport, they created stone versions of the different types of clothing that they wore during the real-life games. These stone versions, like the monkey-shaped skull, were commonly found inside tombs.

For 1,000 years after the Western Roman Empire fell, the Eastern Empire of Byzantium stood strong. Ancient and powerful, the Byzantine court soon became known as a warren of intrigue and secrets. No one was safe, and no one could be trusted.

10Assassinations

Since the Byzantines always felt that an unpopular ruler could be replaced, a number of emperors died violent deaths.

Constans II was clubbed to death with a soap dish while resting in his bath. Michael III lost both his hands trying to block a sword. Nikephoros Phokas was warned of a plot and ordered a search of the palace, but his wife had hidden the assassins in her bedroom, which no guard would dare to search. They stabbed him to death that night.

At least, Leo the Armenian went out in style. Ambushed on Christmas Day by assassins disguised as a choir of chanting monks, he seized a heavy cross from the altar and battled them around the Hagia Sofia until his arm was cut off and he was struck down. Less romantically, the killers then threw his corpse into a toilet.

9Mutilation

The Byzantines believed that disfigurement disqualified candidates for the throne. As a result, emperors often mutilated their rivals rather than killing them outright. Blinding was popular, as was cutting off noses and tongues. In later years, castration became the most common practice.

In some ways, mutilation was considered kinder than execution. John IV Laskaris lived for 40 years after being blinded. But it was undoubtedly brutal. Empress Irene had her own rebellious son blinded in the room where she had given birth to him. The youth died of his wounds a short time later.

However, it was sometimes possible to come back from mutilation. Basil Lekapenos was castrated as a boy to prevent him from causing trouble when he grew up. With the throne closed to him, Basil became a powerful courtier and ruled through a series of puppet emperors.

8The Noseless Emperor

The terrifying Justinian II was first overthrown in AD 695. The rebels cut off his nose and slit his tongue down the middle before exiling him to the Crimea. Undeterred, Justinian escaped to the land of the Khazars and began plotting a return to power. The new emperor bribed the Khazars to murder their guest, but Justinian was warned and personally strangled the assassins before escaping to Bulgaria in a fishing boat.

Forging an alliance with the Bulgarian khan, Justinian returned to Constantinople and led an army through the sewers and into the city where he took a terrible revenge on his enemies. Regaining the throne, he ruled for another six years, wearing a golden nose and using an interpreter to translate the gurgles from his ruined tongue.

His cruelty eventually grew too much, and he was overthrown again in 711. This time, they killed him.

7Intrigue

Today, the word “Byzantine” can refer to an atmosphere of confusion and intrigue, and that was certainly true of the court in Constantinople. There, eunuchs and courtiers jockeyed for influence and emperors ruled through powerful favorites.

In one ninth-century example, the eunuch Staurakios helped Empress Irene overthrow and blind her own son. Staurakios himself was soon forced from power by the eunuch Aetios, who schemed to make his brother emperor. But Aetios failed to guard against the finance minister Nikephoros, who orchestrated a coup and reigned as emperor until the Bulgarians converted his skull into a drinking cup.

This atmosphere of intrigue lasted until Constantinople fell. Even as the Ottomans massed outside the walls, Grand Duke Loukas Notaras was reportedly scheming to secure lucrative court positions for his sons.

6Civil War

In the ninth century, Michael I was forced to resign by a trio of his generals: Leo the Armenian, Michael the Amorian, and Thomas the Slav. Leo became emperor. But when he fell out with Michael, the Amorian’s followers infiltrated the Christmas service and hacked Leo to death. Thomas the Slav rose in revolt against Michael, sparking a massive civil war which badly weakened the empire against the Arabs.

Similar problems arose in the 10th century when Bardas Phokas’s rebellion was put down by General Bardas Skleros. When the eunuch Basil Lekapenos schemed against Skleros, he started his own revolt in self-defense. Lekapenos countered by releasing Phokas from prison and putting him in command against Skleros.

Phokas defeated Skleros in single combat and destroyed his forces. But Phokas, Skleros, and Lekapenos then teamed up against the young Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. Typically, they soon fell to infighting and Basil successfully secured power. He later became famous for blinding thousands of prisoners and sending them back to Bulgaria, where Tsar Samuel promptly died of horror.

5The Purple-Born

The Byzantines had long considered purple the imperial color, with only members of the royal family allowed to wear certain purple dyes. Eventually, the emperor built a special room with walls made of the precious purple stone porphyry.

Imperial children born in this room were dubbed porphyrogennetos (“purple-born”). They were immensely prestigious and weren’t supposed to marry outside the empire, although Vladimir of Kiev famously demanded a Purple-Born bride as the price for military aid and his conversion to Christianity.

The Purple-Born also attracted great loyalty from the common people. Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos was overthrown as a boy, but his Purple-Born status protected him and he was allowed to remain as co-emperor for 24 years.

When Basil II died, the only remaining Purple-Born were the sisters Zoe and Theodora. The citizens of Constantinople rioted at every attempt to remove them from power, and the pair dominated the empire until Theodora’s death in 1056.

4Riots

As citizens of the greatest city on Earth, the people of Constantinople were never afraid to express themselves, often through violence. In the most famous example, fans of the Blue and Green chariot racing teams united to riot against Justinian I.

The emperor was prepared to flee, but the day was saved by his wife, Theodora, who proclaimed that she would rather die an empress than live as a commoner. The rebels were subsequently massacred.

Not all riots destabilized the empire. One particularly bloody civil war was effectively ended by a prison riot. Megaduke Alexios Apokaukos was inspecting his new jail when the political prisoners ran amok and murdered him, crippling his faction.

The assertive tendencies of Constantinople’s citizenry survived the Ottoman conquest, and many a sultan cowered inside the Topkapi Palace while an enraged mob tore his vizier to pieces.

3Castration

Eunuchs served the Byzantine state in every capacity, from courtiers to priests to generals. (The eunuch Peter Phokas became famous for defeating a Scythian warlord in single combat.) They were perceived as nonthreatening because they had no children to inherit their status.

However, eunuchs like John the Orphanotrophos (manager of Constantinople’s orphanage) became notorious for leveraging their brothers into high office. John himself grew so powerful that his whole family had to be castrated and exiled by a nervous emperor.

Castration was technically illegal in the empire. As a result, many eunuchs were enslaved outside the empire as young boys and then castrated just before they were brought across the border. But it wasn’t unknown for impoverished Byzantine parents to castrate their sons in the hope that these boys would grow up to secure lucrative positions at court.

2Sex Slaves

Multiple sources from the period allege that eunuchs were frequently used as sex slaves because they maintained their youthful looks. This was officially forbidden, but the church struggled to find a way to stop it without condemning slavery (and thereby the emperor).

The problem is illustrated in the 10th-century Life Of St. Andrew The Fool, which basically puts the blame on the eunuchs. A character does point out that “if a slave fails to obey, you surely know how much he will suffer, being maltreated and beaten.”

But Andrew insists that “if the slaves do not bow to the abominable passions of their masters, they are thrice blessed, for thanks to the torments you mention, they will be reckoned with the martyrs.”

1The Zealots Of Thessalonica

In 1341, the empire was undergoing one of its regular civil wars. The new emperor was nine years old, and his father’s friend John Kantakouzenos had been appointed regent. The boy’s mother, Anna, and Megaduke Alexios Apokaukos formed an alliance to usurp the regency, sparking a massive conflict.

But this time, something different happened. In the city of Thessalonica, the common people seized control from the aristocracy. Calling themselves “Zealots,” these revolutionaries championed the rights of the poor. Accounts from the time claim that violent mobs of Zealots attacked and slaughtered the rich.

The Zealot council ruled Thessalonica for the duration of the civil war. For a time, they swore allegiance to Megaduke Apokaukos, but they remained hostile to the aristocracy and eventually asserted their independence by murdering his son.

The revolution was only put down after John Kantakouzenos became emperor. Some of the Zealots invited the Serbian king Stefan Dusan to take the city, but others found this unpatriotic and fighting broke out. Kantakouzenos took the city easily and executed the leading Zealots.

Feces is the new gold—at least in archaeology. Not only does ancient scat contain 10 times more DNA than bones, it reveals culture with its window into diet and disease. Once ignored, fossilized feces (“coprolites”) are now casting an entirely new light on history.

10Rome’s Dirty Secret

Ancient Rome was known for its sanitation. However, all their hygiene was not enough to stop a plague of parasites. Researchers from the University of Cambridge discovered that Romans suffered from whipworm, roundworm, and even a fish tapeworm. Earlier periods like the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. Romans suffered from ecto-parasites like fleas, lice, and bedbugs at the same rate as Vikings and Medieval Europeans.

Some of Rome’s sanitation practices may have curbed infection, while others increased the spread of parasites. Public bath water was infrequently changed and may have provided a perfect vector for infections. Romans also used human feces to fertilize crops. While it increases yield, fecal fertilization also spreads intestinal parasites. The presence of fish tapeworm is a testament to Rome’s love of raw fish and an uncooked fermented fish sauce known as “garum.”

9Cannibals Of Cowboy Wash

At a Pueblo site in Cowboy Wash, Colorado, researchers discovered human remains in ancient feces. For decades, archaeologists in the area have unearthed bones that appear to be butchered and boiled. However, there has never been definitive proof of the man-eating—until recently. Analysis of these Colorado coprolites revealed the presence of human muscle tissue. The only way it could have gotten there: cannibalism.

The Hopi and Zuni tribes of the region reject the researchers’ findings. Accusations of cannibalism have been used as a pretext for genocide against indigenous people for centuries.

Researchers do not believe that cannibalism was a common practice. They suspect that it was resorted to during a severe drought between 900 and 1150. The brutality reflected in the skeletons went far beyond what was necessary. One of the cannibals even defecated into the victims’ fireplace—the ultimate insult.

8Neanderthal Diet

Ancient feces found at El Salt in Southern Spain casts a new light on Neanderthals. Dating back 50,000, these are the oldest known human coprolites. For decades, Neanderthal sites have been found littered with animal bones. Researchers have long believed they consumed an all-meat diet. However, we now know they balanced their red meat with vegetable intake.

Without DNA analysis, the coprolites cannot be definitively proven human. Some claim they might belong to a large omnivore like a bear. The researchers stand by their analysis, citing the cholesterol levels are human. They theorize that the mastery of fire around 2 million years ago radically altered the human diet in favor of massive meat consumption.

7Hidden Cargo

The Silk Road once transported goods, technology, and religions between China and Europe. Now we know one more thing was traded along the Silk Road: parasites.

Researchers analyzed hygiene sticks from an ancient outpost along the road in Xuanquanzhi and discovered that they contained eggs from Chinese liver fluke. This intestinal parasite requires marshy habitats to live and reproduce.

For decades, epidemiologists have speculated that other diseases, like anthrax, leprosy, and black plague spread along the Silk Road. Evidence started to mount in 2013, when researchers discovered clusters of a genetic autoimmune disease called Behcet’s disease along the route. The Chinese liver fluke discovery was the first definitive evidence that disease was spread along the Silk Road.

6Hannibal’s Crossing

Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps to attack Rome with 30,000 troops, 15,000 horses, and 37 elephants made him one of the most celebrated generals in history. For millennia, no one has been certain of his route. In the narrow mountain pass of Col de la Traversette, southwest of Turin, Italy, recent discoveries in the form of feces prove Hannibal took this road.

Researchers realized that if they dug down to a sediment level dating back to the Punic Wars, they should find a massive amount of horse manure if Hannibal had traveled this way. When they arrived at the layer dating back 2,200 years ago, they discovered the earth had been churned as if many animals had walked over it. Chemical analysis revealed organic material typical in a horse gut, and DNA testing indicated the presence of microbes associated with horse manure. Hannibal’s route was finally unearthed.

5Viking Turd

In 1972, archaeologists at Jorvik Viking site in England unearthed the largest human coprolite. The prodigious specimen measured 18 centimeters (7 in) and provided a window into Viking diet and their parasites. The diet of the Viking consisted almost entirely of meat and grain. The coprolite was full of the eggs of Ascaris lumbricoides, a parasite with a reputation for savagery on par with its host. This worm is known to bore through tissue and can emerge from any orifice—even the corner of your eye.

The investigation into the Viking turd paints a picture of a parasite-plagued world. Ancient people tolerated a level of filth that seems incomprehensible to us today. Based on the amount of eggs in the specimen, experts determine the Viking’s stomach seethed with worms. Unfortunately, in 2003, the prized piece of crap shattered when its display stand slipped from the hands of a teacher.

4Earliest Americans

Coprolites discovered in Oregon’s Paisley Caves are rewriting the history of the earliest Americans. Experts now believe that the Americas were settled 1,000 years before previously thought.

Human DNA extracted from a specimen dates back 12,300 years, challenging the orthodox notion that Clovis people were the first settlers in North America. Radiocarbon dating has revealed spearheads younger than the coprolites but contemporary with the oldest Clovis technology.

Some contested the findings, claiming human DNA contaminated the specimens during the collection process. They also found that the diet of the Paisley Caves inhabitants lacked a human cholesterol signature and contained an herbivore’s level of vegetation. However, the original team repeated their experiment with new samples and got the same result. The findings suggest multiple waves of settlement with the possibility of a coastal migration becoming more likely.

3Crusader Crap

Parasites have been discovered in 800-year-old feces of a crusader castle in Cyprus. In 1192, King Richard the Lionheart of England sold the island to Guy de Lusignan. The new Frankish owner built Saranda Kolones to protect his investment. In 1222, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Cyprus, destroying most of the fortress. However, the latrines remained intact. Curved to the human form with half-moon openings, the toilets may have appeared elegant, but they were chock full of intestinal invaders.

The ancient feces contained whipworms and giant round worms. A light load of these hangers-on can be little more than a nuisance. However, they can become downright deadly in large quantities. Crusaders were just as likely to die from disease and malnutrition as they were in battle. A heavy parasite load would drastically increase the risk of starvation in periods of scarcity—like sieges and long expeditions.

2Mystery Of Vieques Island

The Pre-Columbian inhabitants of Vieques Island have long been a mystery. This small island off eastern Puerto Rico held two indigenous groups: the Saladoids and the Huecoids. Anthropologists have long debated whether these represented two cultures. Experts believed the Saladoids came from Venezuela, and the Huecoids were from the Bolivian Andes. These theories were speculative and based on craftsmanship. Recent research into coprolites on Vieques Island has finally solved the mystery.

Huecoid feces contained maize and a yeast known for brewing chica, an Andean alcoholic beverage. Experts have long wondered how maize came to the island. They now believe these ancient Bolivian immigrants brought it. Saladoid coprolites contained no maize. They also bore a parasite that affects freshwater fish. The Huecoids were plagued by a marine parasite. These reflect major cultural differences, indicating two distinct people with unique origins. Both groups contributed to the modern Taino Indians.

1Cold Case

Cangrande della Scala was the most powerful man in Verona and the patron of Dante Alighieri. In 1329, just days after winning control of the city of Treviso, he mysteriously fell ill and died. According to contemporary accounts, the sickness came after drinking from a polluted spring. Others suspected murder. In 2004, a team exhumed the warlord’s body to determine the cause of death. X-ray and CT scans revealed arthritis, tuberculosis, and evidence of cirrhosis. However, the breakthrough in the investigation came from a bit of mummified feces.

The nobleman’s dried-out scat contained chamomile, mulberry, and foxglove—a deadly poison. Foxglove—or Digitalis—poisoning exhibits the same ferocious diarrhea, drooling, and seizures della Scala experienced in his final hours. Following the mysterious death, his nephew and successor Mastino II hanged the physician. Della Scala had many enemies. Mastino II might have been one. Researchers are now exploring how fecal analysis could solve more ancient cold cases.

Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Winooski, Vermont, branch of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. He is the coauthor of Codex Exotica and Song-Catcher: The Adventures of Blackwater Jukebox.

[WARNING: This list contains disturbing audio and images.] Sound is both one of the most important and the least noticed parts of a movie. While it’s obviously true that there are entire teams dedicated to perfecting the sound in any professional film, their contributions aren’t as apparent as, say, a stunt artist’s.

See Also: Top 10 Incredible Sounds

We’re not really talking about the background score, either. Some of the most iconic soundtracks of Hollywood aren’t songs at all, but seemingly unimportant sounds like the toilet flush and running water in the basins in bathroom scenes to make them more realistic. Here are ten of the most iconic . . . and, in some cases, disturbing.

10Infrasound And Impending Doom

[WARNING: The youtube video linked here includes subaudible sounds that can cause listeners to suffer extreme discomfort. Please listen with caution.] Gaspar Noé’s 2002 thriller Irreversible evokes some particularly strong feelings. Of course, there’s the very graphic rape scene in the beginning of the movie which we’d highly caution against watching (for those of you who subscribe to such concepts, consider this your “trigger warning”). The rest of the movie is no High School Musical, either, and it’s understandable that it would leave some people with a bad taste in their mouths.

But the horrific scenes of violence are not the only disturbing quality of this film. Many people watching reported feeling an uneasy sense of dread, especially in the more hectic, earlier parts of the film. While many just brushed it off as the filmmaker’s genius, he later admitted to using infrasound to cause the effect in the first 30 minutes of the film.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, infrasound (or subaudible sound) is sound just below our normal hearing range. It doesn’t have to be completely below the threshold, either. Just start approaching the lower end and you’ll begin to “feel” what we’re talking about.

Because people can’t hear the sound but can physically sense it, infrasound ends up causing unexplained feelings of intense dread. It has been effectively – even if sparingly—used in Hollywood ever since they figured out how to reproduce it, as it is highly effective at creating that sense of creeping terror many horror movies leave you with. Interestingly the sound is also associated with many large-scale natural disasters, which suggests that our reaction to it is part of our inbuilt self-defense mechanism.^[1]

9That Time Hollywood Made Us All Listen To Animal Sex

Contrary to popular belief, Jeff Goldblum was not the highlight of the Jurassic Park franchise. It is also remembered for some of the best depictions of dinosaurs on the big screen. For an animal we have never seen in the flesh and only know about from scattered remains of bones around the world, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were quite believable and multi-dimensional. So how did they know what the dinosaurs sounded like?

Simply put, they didn’t. We usually don’t associate ancient animals with any sound, but we do it with dinosaurs because of Jurassic Park, as they created these sounds out of thin air and were basically the first to do so effectively. For anyone who has wondered how they were made, they’re taken from many animals in various stages of having sex. The velociraptor is voiced by mating tortoises, and the T-rex is dolphins in heat. I wonder how many parents would have made their kids stay home from the cinema if they knew they were about to listen to two hours and seven minutes of animals doing the dirty.^[2]

8 Time Dilation In Inception

Inception is one of the few movies that uses sound design as a central part of its storytelling. Hanz Zimmer’s score is hands down one of his best works to date, and much like other aspects of the movie.

One song that keeps showing up throughout the movie—Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’—is more than just an artistic use of the classic song. As some fans found out, the length of the song—2:28 minutes—may have directly influenced the length of the movie . . . 2:28 hours.

More eagle-eyed and hardcore fans, however, had their ears on even more mind-blowing references in the background score, because the famous French song is referred to in other secret places too. As you can see in the clip above, the music in the dream sequences is stretched out and heavy in bass. The time signature of the music in the dreams actually perfectly corresponds with the song, only stretched out according to the time dilation you’re supposed to experience in the dreams, and tweaked to make it sound better.^[3]

7 Star Trek’s Warp Drive

Star Trek will always be remembered for its innovative use of everyday sounds. This makes sense as they had to come up with a lot of new sounds owing to the vast scope of their futuristic setting at a time that no one had really gone there before. The most distinctive and innovative creation of a sound in the series is probably the warp drive.

While it’s easy to imagine the warp sound from movies in 2020, it wasn’t back then. The sound designer, Doug Grindstaff, wanted to make an authentic effect that would serve as a blueprint for all warp drive sounds in the future, and he was successful to a large extent, too.

For the sound, he went back to his college and borrowed a test oscillator from the physics lab. The resulting warp-drive sound effect will now forever be in the human consciousness. The sounds in Star Trek – along with a few other pioneering movies – defined the genre for decades to come. What a legacy!^[4]

6 The Lightsaber

Star Wars is another classic franchise that came up with quite a few unique ways to convey its sound, especially its brilliant and iconic score. Its biggest breakthroughs in sound design, though – much like most of the other entries on this list – lie in sounds that we don’t even notice.

Take the lightsaber. While most people these days would think that it was generated by some kind of a computer, we forget that technology wasn’t as advanced as it is today. The sound was – like a lot of iconic sounds in Hollywood – made by something found in the junk. More specifically, it was made by the hum of an idle film projector combined with the static buzz of a television.

For another classic sound from the series, the iconic ‘pew pew’ sound of the blaster gun was made by a guy smacking a thick wire with a hammer. I want his job!^[5]

5 Psycho Stabbing

When it comes to psychological horror that gets under your skin while not being overtly visible, Alfred Hitchcock set the benchmark. His movies are some of the most iconic psychological thrillers of all times, and for good reason, too. His use of innovative camera techniques and sound design became the standard for many notable works of the genre since then. Psycho is, no doubt, the most iconic of these. It was made using tools and techniques that were clever as well as genre-defining.

One notable scene is when he murders his hotel guest in the shower—the scene most of us imagine when we think of the movie. The sound design of the sequence was central to its successful execution (so to speak), and it didn’t disappoint. Particularly unique in its time was that it was completely free of any music, heightening the tension of the scene.

Many innovative techniques were used to come up with the sparse sounds that made it to the final edit. The sickening sound of the stabs, for example, was made by stabbing casaba melons. Now that I’ve told you that, watch the clip above and you’ll recognize the sound immediately for what it really is.^[6]

4 The Ringwraiths Of The Lord Of The Rings

The Lord of the Rings was the beginning of a new era of fantasy cinema, and—much like its source material – played a pivotal role in defining that genre as we know it today. Of course, much like all aspects of the movie, the sound was brilliantly done, with quite a few cool little secrets involved.

The sound of the Ringwraiths, for one, was made by rubbing plastic cups together. Suddenly they don’t seem so terrifying, right? Another iconic sound from the movie, Balrog’s weird crackling growls, was recorded from the sound of rocks grinding on the floor. It’s probably best that we stop there or you’ll never be able to enjoy the film series in the same way again.^[7]

3 The Mysterious Punching Sounds In Raging Bull

The sound of the punch is one of the most iconic and recognizable sounds in Hollywood, as well as one of the most unnoticed (at least when it’s done well). Whenever we hear it in a movie, we tend to not even register it.

As it turns out, we actually owe a lot of those sounds to Raging Bull, which was the first movie to really play with the acoustics of a bar fight. The movie uses many different types of sounds according to the mood of the different fights in the movie, giving them a dimension most of us wouldn’t even have explicitly noticed. It remains one of both Martin Scorsese and and sound editor Frank Warner’s best works. To this day they have never revealed how any of those sounds were made. This secret, alas, is one that remains a mystery for now. But next time you notice an amazing punch sound in a film or TV show, you know you have Raging Bull to thank.^[8]

2 The Wilhelm Scream

Sound design is a vital part of any movie, with some sounds becoming so associated with a movie that they effect how we remember these works of fiction forever. Some sounds, however, transcend genres. The Wilhelm Scream is by far the most popular and used voice sample in movies, and you just need to hear it to instantly recognize why. So watch the video above for a rather hilarious, albeit horribly low-quality, series of clips showing the sound featured in different films.

As the name suggests, it’s the sound of a human scream. It was first heard in a movie made in 1951, though it wasn’t until it was picked up by Warner Brothers and used in the 1953 film ‘The Charge at Feather River’ that it really gained popularity. Since then, the iconic Wilhelm Scream has been used to simulate the sound of people falling or getting shot in hundreds of movies.

If you’ve seen any popular movie of the last five decades – like Star Wars, Avengers, Avatar, The Hunger Games, or Indiana Jones – you already know what this sounds like . . . you just may not realize it.^[9]

1 The Art Of Foley Effects

In case you didn’t notice, most of the sound effects we have spoken about aren’t over-the-top musical numbers that require creative genius to produce. They are everyday sounds that make moments in movies seem so realistic we don’t even notice. It’s due to these techniques that film making in Hollywood reached such a peak that it was possible to enter a movie theater and get lost in a fantasy world for two hours. Of course nowadays its our livings rooms we get lost in thanks to the likes of ThePirateBayAppleTV and Disney+.

If there’s one person we owe all of that too, it’s Jack Foley, the sound effects engineer who pioneered the technique of taking common objects and using them to re-create the sounds of humans and their interactions with the physical world. This art (and it really is an art—see the video above for proof) is named after him, and it’s one of those jobs that you won’t notice if it’s done well.^[10]

Crypts contain more than just human remains. These subterranean skeleton sanctuaries hold secrets. Artistic masterpieces, relics, and even evidence of disease have been recovered from crypts. These mysterious artifacts tantalize archaeologists with the window they provide into the deceased’s world. Many more enigmas await discovery in the shadows of crypts.

10 Siberian Death Masks

In 2015, researchers found 20 death masks in an ancient crypt in Siberia’s Kemerovo region. The tomb belonged to the enigmatic Tashtyk people, warriors who controlled large portions of Siberia between 300 BC and AD 500. The crypt was dug into the ground, surrounded by a stone wall, and covered with a log roof. The massive burial pit took two years to excavate.

Archaeologists discovered the remains of 30 people who had been cremated and placed inside dummy bodies made of fabric and leather. “Death masks” of gypsum provided the dummies’ faces. Some were surprised to find that the Tashtyk death masks have stereotypically European features. The remains of children were discovered outside the tomb. None of the youngsters had death masks.

Gypsum is a soft mineral, so many of the masks are in fragments. However, experts believe they may be able to piece together the broken faces.

9 Seven Magical Mummies

In 2009, archaeologists discovered seven mummies in a 900-year-old crypt with walls covered in magical inscriptions. The naturally preserved remains came from deep within a monastery in Old Dongola, the capital of the medieval kingdom of Makuria in modern-day Sudan. The crypt contained the remains of seven males, all over age 40. The burial chamber was sealed with bricks and mud mortar.

Black ink inscriptions in Sahidic Coptic and Greek cloak the crypt’s whitewashed walls. There are Gospel excerpts along with magical names and symbols, which are believed to have been intended to protect the dead from malicious forces. Tradition held that the recently deceased were in a state of flux and were vulnerable before they faced judgment.

The crypt was first located in 1933, but excavations would not occur until over 70 years later. Experts believe one of the mummies might be Archbishop Georgios, one of the most powerful Christians in Makuria.

8 The Buddha’s Skull

Archaeologists believe they may have found a piece of the Buddha’s skull in a 1,000-year-old chest discovered in a crypt beneath Grand Bao’en Temple in Nanjing, China. The stupa not only contained what might be the skull of the Buddha, but it was filled with the bones of other Buddhist saints. The box was constructed of carved sandalwood, covered in silver and gold, and encrusted with crystal, glass, lapis lazuli, and agate. Inscriptions reveal that the stupa was made during Emperor Zhenzong’s reign (AD 997–1022) during the Song Dynasty.

The stupa was nestled within an iron box, which in turn was housed in a stone chest. According to tradition, when the Buddha was cremated, King Ashoka of India decided to divide the saint’s body into 84,000 equal shares. China received 19 of these, including the Buddha’s parietal bone. The remains were originally housed in another temple, which was destroyed in warfare 1,400 years ago.

7 Cancer Mummy

In 1995, archaeologists unearthed an 18th-century Hungarian mummy that is revolutionizing the study of cancer. The naturally preserved remains were discovered in the sealed crypt of a Dominican church in Vac. Roughly 260 mummified remains were found in total. A team of Israeli researchers tested the corpses to see if they were carriers of cancer-causing genes. In one individual, they discovered a mutation in the APC gene, which is known to cause an increased risk of colon cancer.

What the findings suggest is that a predisposition existed before the disease became a serious health issue. Today, colorectal cancer is the third most common form of cancer. Most consider it to be a modern disease that results from a lack of activity, processed foods, and a longer life expectancy. The presence of the mutated gene in other mummies would indicate that genetic inheritance might be even more important than environment.

6 Secret Medici Crypt

In 2004, archaeologists discovered a secret crypt belonging to Italy’s powerful Medici family. During an earlier exploration of a known Medici crypt, experts were shocked to discover that the grave of the last Medici, Grand Duke Gian Gastone, was empty. In an attempt to find the missing corpse, they discovered a clandestine chamber behind the main altar of Florence’s Church of San Lorenzo. Researchers lifted a stone slab to reveal steps leading to the hidden crypt.

The secret chamber contained one adult coffin, which held Gastone, and eight child coffins. All of the children’s bones showed signs of rickets. This is likely due to a lack of vitamin D in their diet. Being sheltered indoors under thick, pale makeup didn’t help their absorption of this necessary element. Researchers cannot identify some of the dead youngsters. It is likely that at least some of them are illegitimate children.

5 Earliest Depiction Of Jesus

In an Egyptian crypt, archaeologists recently unearthed what might be the oldest depiction of Jesus. Located in the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, the mysterious underground structure could only be accessed once researchers removed 45 tons of stone. The walls of the crypt contained six layers of paint. The last was from the period of the early Coptic Christians.

One painting drew experts’ attention: The mysterious image shows a tunic-clad young man with curly hair performing a blessing. Some believe this is the earliest known likeness of Christ. However, until researchers translate cryptic inscriptions around the figure, the man’s identity remains a mystery. The crypt belongs to a 17-year-old scribe and a family of priests.

Archaeologists report that they haven’t had time yet to explore another mysterious space attached to the crypt. They have no idea what they will find in the new hidden chamber.

4 Crypt Of The Ancient Astronaut

The secret opening to the crypt of Pakal II, the Maya ruler of Palenque, was discovered in 1948. It took four more years to clear the rubble away so that researchers could enter the hidden chamber. The monarch’s remains were discovered clad in a jade mask with beads. Sculptures and carvings of Mayan underworld beliefs surround the ancient ruler.

Pakal II supposedly died at age 80. However, the skeletal remains appear to be that of a 40-year-old. What’s more, a carving on the lid of his tomb has convinced some that Pakal II might not even have been human. The engraving became famous after the controversial 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods suggested that, if turned sideways, the image depicts Pakal II aboard a spacecraft. One viewer may see Mayan iconography related to death, rebirth, and the cosmos. Another sees a fuselage, complete with a breathing apparatus and controls.

3 Prague’s Hidden Masterpiece

Art historians recently discovered a never-before-seen monument deep within Prague’s Loreto crypt, beneath the Church of the Nativity of Our Lord. The walls of the tomb are covered with intricate depictions of death, resurrection, and allegories for time. Dated to 1664, these amazing depictions of Ars moriendi utilize only black and gray to create a sophisticated shading system known as chiaroscuro.

The paintings were discovered in 2011, when the crypt was opened for the first time in decades. Many of the works are inspired by Dutch art, including copies of Rembrandt. The identity of the artist remains a mystery. Some speculate that it might have been Cosmas of Austria or Viennese painter Tobias Pock. Both had a history of working with the Capuchin monks. It is also unknown whether the subject matter was selected by the artist or the crypt’s patron, Countess Elisabeth Apollonia of Kolowrat.

2 Heart Burial

In 2015, archaeologists unearthed five 400-year-old hearts from the crypt under the Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France. The embalmed organs were buried in heart-shaped lead urns, which feature inscriptions revealing ownership details. Dated to the 16th and 17th centuries, these preserved pumps were discovered by teams inspecting the convent before it becomes a conference center. They are part of a long tradition of “heart burials.”

The hearts were cleaned and removed of embalming material so that they could be analyzed with MRI and CT technology to get a glimpse into ancient circulation. One heart had no disease, while three others showed serious blockages, including plaque and atherosclerosis.

Researchers discovered a knight’s heart inside the grave of Louise de Quengo, Lady of Brefeillac. It belonged to her husband, Toussaint Perrien. The practice of being buried with the heart of one’s spouse was common during this period.

1 Jesus’s Family

In 1980, archaeologists discovered a hidden crypt in Jerusalem. The Talpiot Tomb contained ten mysterious ossuaries. Some claim these boxes, meant for holding human remains, are definitive proof that this was the final resting place of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. This discovery meant that Christ not only was not raised from the dead, but had a wife and children.

Inscriptions on the ossuaries reveal them to belong to “Jesus, Son of Joseph,” “Mary, the master,” and even “Judas, son of Jesus.” Some have been lead to believe that this means Christ, Mary Magdalene, and their son.

Some critics argue, however, that the name “Jesus” is actually “Hanun.” Others believe the inscription on Mary’s ossuary has been mistranslated and should read “Mariam and Mara.” They believe this ossuary contains the remains of two females. In addition, the inscription on Mary’s ossuary is in Greek, while the others are in Aramaic.

Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Winooski, Vermont, branch of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. He is the coauthor of Codex Exotica and Song-Catcher: The Adventures of Blackwater Jukebox.

There exists a bloody corner in the glitzy world of horse racing. Though many owners, trainers, and jockeys love their horses, some couldn’t care less about these hoofed wonders. They see thoroughbreds as machines to make money as fast as possible and be discarded afterward. Every area of a racehorse’s life and death gets milked, sometimes in horrific ways.

10Healthy Newborn Foals Are Killed

The services of a stud stallion costs thousands of dollars. In some contracts, this packet of heavy dough is not payable on the day of conception but only after the foal has survived its first 48 hours of life. So if a foal would somehow expire in those two days—by, say, an accident—not a cent will trade hands.

Many owners’ financial situations go downhill quickly, and by the time the foal is born, they no longer want to pay the large sum. Apart from the thousands swallowed up by the stud fee, many more thousands would go into the foal’s upkeep and training. It’s a financial gamble to hope that after investing all that, the foal will grow up and become a good earner. When finances are shaky, owners just don’t want to take that chance. So they kill the foal and save themselves the expense.

9Organized Crime

Racing is big money, and where big money blooms, organized crime is never far away. The sport’s history is riddled with sordid incidents, including horses getting shot or kidnapped.

Modern times may show fewer incidents that the mainstream public is aware of, but that doesn’t mean that the sport of kings has suddenly turned sparkly clean and fair. It just means that the dark underbelly of racing is covering its tracks better. Activities today include dispensing performance-enhancing drugs, illicit betting rings, race fixing, bribery, and even the killing of horses.

Asian triads, Mexican drug cartels, and the Irish mafia all have a finger in this pie. In 2013, a Mexican drug cartel ran a highly successful money laundering operation that included horse doping and race fixing. It lasted for 30 months. This particular cartel spent $20 million on the operation.

8Champions Are Butchered

The next time you pub crawl Japan, scan the country’s menus for a fruity-sounding item named “Cherry Blossom.” It’s not a crunchy salad bursting with cherries and garnished with small oriental blooms. It’s raw horsemeat. You will be likely be sticking your chopstick into what used to be a racehorse.

Conservative estimates points to thousands of horses leaving the US every year to be slaughtered abroad for human consumption in countries like Japan, France, Italy, and Belgium. These healthy animals are deemed useless to the industry, despite having given their owners great winnings and valuable offspring. Exceller, a million-dollar winner and Hall of Fame inductee, met his end at a Swedish slaughterhouse. The stables of re-homing organizations are so full that the owner of an unwanted healthy racehorse would rather sell the animal to an abattoir than shell out the money to pay a vet to destroy it.

Horses sold to slaughterhouses are not euthanized. Instead, they meet with grisly and agonizing ends. They are shot, sometimes several times, with either live bullets or metal spikes. Another horrifying technique is to sever the horse’s spinal cord with several violent stabs. This leaves the terrified animal paralyzed but still alive, aware, and in agony. No matter the technique, the end phase sees them strung up by their hind legs to bleed out. Some wake up in this position right before their throats are slit.

7The Milk Mares

Milk mares are the foster mothers of the horsey world. They feed foals orphaned or rejected by their own birth mothers. To have milk, a milk mare must have had her own child. So where is her own foal when she is busy suckling another? Dead.

Valuable thoroughbred mares must produce foals as fast as unscrupulous breeders can breed them. They are impregnated again just a few days after giving birth. Such brood mares must often travel to stud farms, and since travel is risky for a newborn (and insurance generally forbids it), foals are left behind. The youngster is then farmed out to a hired nurse mare, for months in cases of maternal rejection or orphaning.

These stand-in mothers exist only to produce milk for another mare’s more valuable offspring, while their own biological foals are viewed as an unwanted byproduct. The only worth of these perfectly healthy foals is in what their bodies have to offer after death. Left to starve to death or simply bludgeoned into the afterlife, their skins are sold as pony leather, and their meat is sold as a delicacy. These less valuable foals are often skinned alive due to the belief that it makes the meat more tender.

6Horses Are Whipped

As the public becomes more informed about the use and consequences of the racing crop, more people begin to frown on the practice, but jockeys love it. They use it mostly to spur their mounts on during the last stretch of the race. This is weird because the horses aren’t exactly strolling toward the winning post during this time—they’re running at full speed and cannot go any faster.

A riding crop is made from leather, a material chosen specifically for its sting when swung. Due to public pressure, some now use air-padded whips, but many racehorses still get flogged with the entire length of the whip’s shaft. They’re struck up to 30 times per race, and the physical and psychological distress decreases the animal’s concentration. It’s no wonder that whips have been involved in 86 percent of all accidents on the track.

A jockey in the habit of using the crop can deal out hundreds of painful lashes during a horse’s lifetime. Using a whip does not improve a racehorse’s performance.

5Racehorses Are Too Inbred

The thoroughbred gene pool resembles a muddy pond that shrinks with every passing year. Today’s strong and fit animal is close to an illusion compared to earlier racehorses that were not as fast but could run forever. Now, young colts and fillies run on ankles too small for their bulky bodies, and 90 percent of those finishing a race bleed from their lungs, sometimes so badly that it sloshes out as a nosebleed.

Some place the blame for frequent career-ending (and sometimes life-ending) leg injuries at the sore feet of prized stallion Native Dancer. This weak-ankled but superfast sire is written down in nearly every thoroughbred’s family tree. In the 2008 Kentucky Derby, all 20 of the horses had his blood. The spectacular filly Eight Belles had the most; she was a descendant of Native Dancer through three grandparents. Finishing second, she broke both of her front ankles and had to be euthanized on the track.

Pedigree counts, but name-dropping in thoroughbred papers has reached such dangerous proportions that speed is now valued above all else, even to the detriment of passing unsound traits on to offspring. Such practices today compound an old problem: Racehorses never had a broad gene pool to begin with. The foundation of the entire existing global population of thoroughbreds can be traced back to a mere three stallions.

4Horses Start Racing Too Young

Some of the biggest prize purses come with races held for the two- and three-year-olds. That’s like placing a preschooler into pro athletics—they will get hurt and washed up before they are even fully grown. At that age, the skeleton is still hardening. These developing juveniles face rigorous training and racing that streak their careers and future with horrible injuries. It’s no longer unusual to see a racehorse retire at the age of three or four when previously they would only be beginning their careers. In the past, racehorses started racing at a later and much better developmental stage.

Since their leg bones will only harden at about age three, and the bone plates in their backs only fuse when they are around five years old, these animals are ill equipped to deal with the massive stresses that racing places on their well-being. Their bones break, and they develop arthritis and heart problems, painful stomach ulcers, and crushed cartilage. Should they start racing at four, they will have less injuries and a longer career, but big money remains in the premature baby races.

3Drug Addiction

The racing world floats on a sea of hard-to-detect designer drugs injected into horses every day. Medications meant to ease an animal’s pain, such as morphine, are being used to get the horse out onto the track again as fast as possible. But masking the pain and forcing the animal to run on an existing injury has dire results. If it doesn’t cause the horse to break down during the next race, it can certainly worsen the injury.

Anabolic steroids and caffeine used to be popular stimulants, but since they are so easy to detect today, other substances like “elephant juice” are making the scene. A tranquilizer for large animals, it’s a potent stimulant when given to a horse in correct doses. If a horse needs to be slowed down, beta blockers will be given instead.

Racehorses still suffer from tubes being forced down their noses. This inhumane practice pumps a cocktail of sugar, baking soda, and electrolytes directly into the stomach. It makes the horse run faster and for longer, but the tube is sometimes accidently inserted into the lungs instead, drowning the animal on its feet. The prolific use of drugs wreaks havoc on the condition of the racehorses and hides injuries from track vets. When retired, horses often suffer from months of drug withdrawal symptoms while being weaned off their racing medications.

2Mares Are Force-Bred

In nature, if a mare isn’t ready for mating, she’ll refuse the stallion’s attentions, and that will be the end of it. But in the breeding shed, and with humans working on a time schedule, such behavior is labeled as “being difficult.” She is bodily tied down and drugged according to the amount of resistance. She is then forcefully bred to a stallion, sometimes only a few days after having given birth to a foal.

When a female racehorse retires and becomes a broodmare, she is kept pregnant for up to 90 percent of her reproductive life, producing foal after foal. Many mares succumb later in life due to complications from too many pregnancies.

1Horses Are Killed For Insurance

Calumet Farm was famous for producing more Kentucky Derby winners than any other establishment, but Alydar was their most stellar racehorse. Not only did he shine on the racetrack, but his stud fees provided Calumet with tens of millions of dollars. Insured for a mouthwatering $36.5 million by Lloyds of London, the stallion’s policy was set to expire in a couple of weeks when Alydar was discovered in his stall with a badly broken right rear leg. A cast was placed on the leg, but Alydar later managed to fall and hurt himself even worse. The legendary horse was euthanized after that.

The insurance company paid out, and Calumet president J.T. Lundy got a separate bank loan of over $65 million under fraudulent circumstances. Despite this, the stud farm still folded and went bankrupt. Because of the fraud and the farm’s dire financial situation, some argued that Alydar had been killed in a last-ditch effort to save the place. Lundy was sent to prison for the bank fraud, but he was never brought to book for Alydar’s death, though that the judge conceded that Lundy certainly had the motive and opportunity to kill the horse.

Officially, the great chestnut had kicked down the door of his stall and thus broke his leg. This claim did not sit well with George Pratt, an esteemed MIT professor who ran an analysis on the scenario. He calculated that the stallion never had the power required to knock the door off its hinges. He even told the FBI that he believed Alydar’s leg was broken inside his stall and that the so-called accident’s evidence was staged.

While Alydar’s highly suspicious death was difficult to prove in court, other horse killers have been prosecuted. Their methods of killing for insurance included cases of bludgeoning, dragging a horse with a truck, and shooting an animal during hunting season to make it look like a hunting accident. One colt’s neck was broken, with the scene staged to look like it had snapped its own neck while trying to free itself from a fence.

Siberia is massive, stretching eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. With roughly three inhabitants per square kilometer, it is one of the least densely populated places on Earth. However, it has proven to be a treasure trove for archaeologists. The cool, dry air and permafrost has a unique way of preserving the deep past. Despite our view of it as inhospitable, Siberia was once a cradle of mankind.

10 Shigir Idol

Archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest wooden sculpture while excavating a bog in Western Siberia in the late 19th century. Determined to be 11,000 years old, the idol is twice as old as the great pyramids and 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. The 2.8-meter (9.2 ft) figure was carved from a larch tree that was 157 years old when it was felled with stone tools.

Conditions in the bog preserved the idol. The statue’s face remains vivid, as do the series of lines and squiggles that crisscross the idol’s body. Some believe the idol’s smaller faces and lines contain encrypted information. One has suggested that they represent various types of terrain. Others believe that the idol, which once stood 5.2 meters (17 ft) tall, might represent a prototype of a Native American totem pole.

9 Gender-Bending Amazon

In 1990, archaeologists thought they’d unearthed the remains of an female warrior in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. The 2,500-year-old, pig-tailed teenager was believed to have been part of an elite group of Pazyryk warriors. Buried alongside shields, battle axes, and bows and arrows, the teenager had a physique suggesting an expert horse rider. Ancient Greek writer Hippocrates noted that the Scythians had female warriors called Amazons. Many believed they had finally discovered one of these mythical warriors. However, DNA analysis shattered this view.

It turns out she was a he. Roughly 16 at the time of his death, the “Amazon” was buried surrounded by fertility symbols like cowrie shells as well as amulets. The coffin, wooden pillow, and quiver were all smaller than those found in men’s graves. The remains of nine horses, including four bridled ones, suggest high status. The cause of the pig-tailed warrior’s death remains a mystery.

8 Oldest Cancer

Many believe cancer to be a modern disease. For years, researchers have speculated that the lives of premodern humans, who were active and ate natural foods, were cancer-free. However, the 2014 discovery of a Bronze Age Siberian man who died of prostate cancer refutes this. While 6,000-year-old benign growths have been discovered, this 4,500-year-old example is the oldest absolutely confirmed case of cancer.

The man was discovered in a small burial site in Siberia’s Cis-Baikal region. Most of the men found at the site have been discovered on their backs with hunting and fishing gear. However, cancer man was different. He was found in a fetal position with an intricately carved bone spoon beside him. This suggests he lived a life outside of the normal community. However, the arrangement might be related to the slow and agonizing death he suffered, nauseous and unable to breathe.

7 Racially Realigned Idol

Archaeologists believe that a 2,400-year-old Siberian stone idol underwent “racial realignment” in the early Middle Ages. The Ust-Taseyevsky idol has flared nostrils, a large, open mouth, a mustache, and a bushy beard. Experts theorize that around 1,500 years ago, someone gave him “plastic surgery” to look less Caucasian and more Asian.

Archaeologists believe that the Ust-Taseyevsky idol was originally carved during the Scythian period, when inhabitants of the region were European-looking. During the early Middle Ages, the population of the Angara River region shifted with an influx of Mongols. There is evidence of a less talented sculptor narrowing the idol’s eyes. The bridge of the nose was flattened, and its contour was altered. The beard and mustache were partially “shaved” off. Researchers believe the idol received another alteration in the late 17th century, after Russian occupation. A small, conical hole was drilled into the mouth for a tobacco pipe.

6 Bone Armor

Archaeologists recently unearthed a suit of bone armor in Siberia. The 3,900-year-old protective gear was made from an unknown animal and was buried separately from its owner in the forested western steppe around Omsk. While most of the finds in the area are from the Krotov culture, researchers believe the armor belongs to the Samus-Seyminskaya culture, which originated in the Altai Mountains before migrating southwest.

The armor was found in “perfect condition” and is believed to have been a gift, exchange, or perhaps spoils of war. The protective bone gear was discovered 1.5 meters (5 ft) underground near a sanatorium that was being renovated into a hotel. The separate burial suggests the armor’s involvement in ritual. Armor of this nature would have required constant care and was believed to have belonged to an elite warrior. Bone armor is not unique to the Altai. The Aleuts, Inuit, and Tlingit people were all known to wear bone armor.

5 Oldest Sewing Needle

Archaeologists recently unearthed the world’s oldest sewing needle in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. The 50,000-year-old needle was discovered in Denisova Cave and was used by non-Homo sapiens. The 7-centimeter (2.8 in) needle contains a hole for thread and was made from the bone of a large, unidentified bird. Researchers had previously found needles in later cave layers, but this is the oldest and longest one yet discovered.

This needle predates the previous earliest-known specimen by 40,000 years. It was discovered in the same layer as our mysterious hominid cousins, the Denisovans, who were named after the cave. The Denisovans were more technologically advanced than Neanderthals. A precise hole in a Denisovan bracelet could only have been accomplished with a high-rotation drill similar to those used today.

4 Okunev Noblewoman

In the Siberian republic of Khakassia, archaeologists discovered the remains of a noblewoman from the ancient Okunev culture. Experts consider the Okunev to be the Siberian ethnic group most closely related to Native Americans. Dated to between the 25th and 18th centuries BC, the unmolested grave also contained the remains of a child and vast wealth.

The tomb contained 100 decorations made from animal teeth, bone and horn tools, two jars, cases filled with bone needles, a bronze knife, and more than 1,500 beads adorning her funerary garb. A clay incense burner contains the same Sun-shaped faces that adorn other ancient Siberian rock art. Before, these “masks” had been shrouded in mystery. Now, experts can definitively connect these carvings with Okunev burials. A stone slab containing the image of a bull suggests a southern origin for the Okunev. These bull slabs are uncommon in Siberia but are found throughout Kazakhstan.

3 3,000-Year-Old Brain Surgery

In 2015, archaeologists unearthed a skull at Siberia’s Nefteprovod II burial site that shows evidence of brain surgery being performed 3,000 years ago. The patient died between the ages of 30 and 40, and the chips taken out of his skull suggest surgical intervention. His open parietal bone showed signs of healing, suggesting that he lived for a period of time after the trephination. Experts believe his death was caused by postsurgical inflammation.

Common painkillers like opiates do not grow in the region, but there was no shortage of mind-altering substances in ancient Siberia. Juniper and thyme were used in shamanistic practices and as analgesics. Fly agaric mushrooms were powerful hallucinogens commonly used in Northern Siberia. Cannabis was common in the region and is often found in burials. It is likely that cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms, juniper, thyme, and shamanistic ecstatic dancing were used to bring the patient into a state of altered consciousness where surgery could be performed.

2 Dina And Yuan

In 2015, researchers discovered two extinct lion cubs in Siberia’s permafrost deposits. Dubbed Dina and Uyan, the cubs may be 57,000 years old. Dina and Uyan are cave lions, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago. They were siblings around one or two weeks old when their den collapsed. An opaque white fluid discovered in their stomachs may be the world’s oldest milk.

Cave lions dominated Eurasia, Alaska, and Northern Canada between the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Researchers are hoping that the cubs will help them discover what drove cave lions to extinction. Most experts believe these ancient predators were eradicated for their pelts.

South Korean cloning expert Hwang Woo-suk plans to replicate the cave lions. He has already made progress with woolly mammoths. His team will try to preserve the specimens as long as possible, and hopefully, cloning technology will catch up with the state of remains.

1 Couple Holding Hands For 5,000 Years

Archaeologists recently unearthed a Siberian couple who have been holding hands for 5,000 years. The Bronze Age skeletons are believed to belong to a dignitary and his wife or lover. Discovered on the shores of Lake Baikal, the couple belongs to the ancient Glazkov culture. The burial was filled with rare white jade rings, pendants of red deer and musk deer teeth, a 50-centimeter (20 in) jade dagger, and an unidentified metal object in a pouch between the man’s legs.

The couple was found lying on their backs. Their heads are turned to the west, and their hands are joined. The male skeleton is complete. Unfortunately, rodents disturbed the upper portion of the female. The use of the woman’s large jade knife remains unknown. The bodies were found in an ancient sacred burial ground overlooking the lake. To deter grave robbers, the exact location of the burial has been kept secret.

Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Winooski, Vermont, branch of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. He is the coauthor of Codex Exotica and Song-Catcher: The Adventures of Blackwater Jukebox.