Unruly History in the News #49

CIA cats, hidden Michelangelo drawings, and Amelia Earhart's plane (maybe)

Hi everyone,

How’s everyone’s week going? I’ve been planning a few book events—can’t wait to share them with you all soon. There’s still plenty of time to preorder my book!

Did you see everything that was posted this week?

• Episode #42: Saint Valentine

• Bonus episode: The Sleeper in the Cave

This week, in history acting unruly…

• This Roman funerary bed, excavated from a site in London, is surprising both because it’s remarkably well-preserved and for its flat-packing feature. Apparently, IKEA didn’t pioneer that idea after all.

• Louis Le Prince invented the first motion picture camera, but his name has been largely forgotten due to his mysterious disappearance before his first-ever movie (Roundhay Garden Scene, 1888) could be screened. Theories abound, but the wildest one might be that Thomas Edison had something to do with it.

• Are these sketches, discovered in an unused room in the Medicis Chapels Museum, rough drafts drawn by Michelangelo?

  

  Could this drawing, discovered in the 1970s, be a rough draft drawn by Michelangelo in preparation for the Sistine Chapel? Photo: Paolo Woods, National Geographic

• The runic engravings on this small knife are the oldest ever found in Denmark. The script is the oldest known runic script, and the find tells us a lot about writing and language 2,000 years ago.

• A wooden tablet bearing the mysterious Rongorongo script has been unearthed on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The tablet predates European colonization, supporting the idea that the written language is one of the rare independently developed writing systems.

• I think anyone who has ever interacted with a cat will be unsurprised to learn that the animals make terrible spies. But during the Cold War, the CIA invested millions in trying to make cats into spies during Operation Acoustic Kitty.

• This unique ring with two faces on it was unearthed in Poland. Dating to the 11th or 12th century, theories that the two faces represent the Roman God Janus raise more questions regarding long-held beliefs of Christian dominance in the region by that time.

  

  The unique medieval ring was found beneath Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków, Poland. Photo credit: Wawel Royal Castle

• We finally have proof that the ancient Romans living in modern-day Netherlands like to party as much as their descendants! Okay, not exactly—but we do have proof that they used the toxic plant henbane for medicinal and/or religious and/or psychoactive purposes.

• The 19th-century craze for medicinal leeches left the poor things nearly extinct! In addition to over-hunting for medical treatments of various efficacy, leeches also suffer from a lack of food supply in the wild. Though they inhabit a wide natural territory, the declining populations of the large mammals they usually feed from have trickled down to leave these poor bugs starving.

• This beautiful Maya jade mask was recently discovered at a site in Guatemala that had been already harmed by looters. Thankfully, they happened to overlook this incredible find.

  

  The jade mask was discovered in an ancient Maya pyramid. Photo credit: Rubén Salgado Escudero.

• A scroll from Pompeii has been decoded through the Vesuvius challenge! Thanks to Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger, we can now read a document that has been hidden from us for 275 years. Preliminary translations indicate that the scroll is a never-before-seen piece from antiquity on the subject of pleasure. This is an awesome use of AI—more this, less stealing from artists, please!

• A “stunningly intact” Avar warrior has been unearthed in eastern Hungary. His lamellar armor from the 7th century BCE is only the second full set ever discovered.

• Questions still abound about how Rasputin really died.

  • If you’re interested in Rasputin, check out my episode all about him.

    #36: Rasputin

• Speaking of murder, the “world’s worst shipwreck” was even bloodier than we thought! Read on for mutiny, slavery, and murder on the high seas.

• I have said it before and I will say it again: Doctors need to bring back prescribing long periods of rest by the seaside!

• Have you heard of the Scablands? These mysterious geological formations stumped experts for decades, until one man’s dogged reveal of a new theory that scandalized dogmatic geographers: Floods. Massive floods.

• This sonar image might hold the answer to what became of Amelia Earhart. Or it might be a different crashed plane. Or it might be nothing. Unfortunately, the exploration team that found it ran out of money and time.

  

  Does this sonar image show Amelia Earhart’s plane? Or just a coincidentally shaped bit of coral? No one knows… yet! Source: Deep Sea Vision.

• Unlike Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, these photos do show us what happened to three explorers who tried to reach the Arctic via hydrogen balloon. The haunting photographs and journals were discovered decades after the men disappeared, along with their bodies and the crashed balloon.

• In the Indian Himalayas, Lake Roopkund is home to a spooky mystery: Why are 800 bodies buried in its depths? Some died all at once, but not from battles or natural disasters. None are related to each other. What’s going on in Lake Roopkund?

• An archaeological site in Puyang, China has unearthed incredible fortune-telling tools, like bone slips.