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+16 +3
12,000-year-old paintings show humans alongside giant animals
Archaeologists discovered a collection of 12,000-year-old rock paintings in the Amazon that depict people living amongst mastodons and other giant animals.
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+22 +5
Who Were America's Enslaved? A New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers
The public website draws connections between existing datasets to piece together fragmentary narratives
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+10 +3
What Did the Stone Age Sound Like?
A team of archaeologists is working to uncover whether ancient objects in South Africa were once used as sound tools to make noise or music.
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+15 +3
Lessons in the Decline of Democracy From the Ruined Roman Republic
The U.S. Constitution owes a huge debt to ancient Rome. The Founding Fathers were well-versed in Greek and Roman History. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read the historian Polybius, who laid out one of the clearest descriptions of the Roman Republic’s constitution, where representatives of various factions and social classes checked the power of the elites and the power of the mob. It’s not surprising that in the United States’ nascent years, comparisons to ancient Rome were common.
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+23 +2
How the Great Frost of 1709 left England’s economy in ruin
Three hundred years ago it was a three-month cold snap rather than disease that blighted the country
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+2 +1
George Orwell is out of copyright. What happens now?
Much of the author’s work may have fallen into public ownership in the UK, but there are more restrictions on its use remaining than you might expect, explains his biographer
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+14 +5
The day police bombed a city street: can scars of 1985 Move atrocity be healed?
An airstrike killed 11 people, including five children, in an assault on a Philadelphia black liberation group. Now a reconciliation effort is under way
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+20 +6
How midnight digs at a holy Tibetan cave opened a window to prehistoric humans living on the roof of the world
Early humans called Denisovans lived in a remote mountain cave between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and possibly longer still, raising intriguing questions about their relationship to modern humans.
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+17 +4
The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future
Mike Pondsmith created Cyberpunk in 1988. Now it’s the inspiration for a highly anticipated video game—and an unlikely oracle.
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+14 +5
The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year
For many Native Americans, the Covid-19 toll and the struggle over racial inequity make this high time to re-examine the holiday, and a cruel history.
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+25 +5
52 Years Later, IBM Apologizes for Firing Transgender Woman
Lynn Conway was one of the company’s most promising young computer engineers but after confiding to supervisors that she was transgender, they fired her.
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+21 +4
Chopin's interest in men airbrushed from history, programme claims
Frédéric Chopin’s archivists and biographers have for centuries turned a deliberate blind eye to the composer’s homoerotic letters in order to make the Polish national icon conform to conservative norms, it has been alleged. Chopin’s Men, a two-hour radio programme that aired on Swiss public broadcaster SRF’s arts channel, argues that the composer’s letters have been at times deliberately mistranslated, rumours of affairs with women exaggerated...
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+14 +2
Charles Darwin: Notebooks worth millions lost for 20 years
Cambridge University Library launches an appeal to find the scientist's missing notes and sketches.
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+21 +4
What would happen if computers never got any faster?
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 – with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops.
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+13 +2
Rare photos kept secret for over a century - BBC Reel
When Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell stumbled across a photo from the 1920s of two men in a tender embrace they thought it was one-of-a-kind. But things changed when they found more photographs. The result of their unexpected discovery is a moving book, portraying male romance over the course of a century.
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+11 +2
'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
Tens of thousands of ice age paintings across a cliff face shed light on people and animals from 12,500 years ago
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+13 +2
How America’s deadliest serial killer went undetected for more than 40 years
Samuel Little says he killed 93 people, preying on women from the margins of society. Again and again, police across the country failed to stop him.
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+14 +3
Astonishing story of teenage boy who killed a Nazi, escaped the Holocaust and led secret life in UK revealed by his son
When British man John Carr learned that his father was not a Polish Catholic who had settled in Britain after the war but was in fact a Jew who had escaped from the Łódź ghetto when he was just 13 years old, he had no idea that the shocking revelation would take him on a journey of discovery into the darkest corners of modern history.
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+15 +3
The man who posted himself to Australia
In 1964 Australian athlete Reg Spiers sent himself from London to Australia in a wooden box - he was transported as freight in the cargo hold of a plane.
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+19 +2
How a flu virus shut down the US economy in 1872 – by infecting horses
A fast-moving equine flu cratered the US economy in the fall of 1872, showing all too clearly that horses were essential and deserved better treatment.
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