Unruly History in the News #9
Thanksgiving Pie Edition. Plus: T-Rex was even more terrifying than Jurassic Park let on.
It’s Thanksgiving here in the US. If you’re celebrating this weekend, I’d love to hear all about your family’s Thanksgiving traditions.
This week, in history acting unruly…
An examination of the myths surrounding Thanksgiving and the damage that they cause.
Is the modern Thanksgiving meal modeled on the ancient Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot?
It’s worth noting that Indigenous Americans had their own harvest festivals already in place when Europeans invaded. Arguably, the Puritans might have just been lifting those.
Around the Thanksgiving dinner table on Thursday you might have been asking yourself, “Are humans inherently violent?” The answer is: We’re not sure, but science is working on it.
But pie made it worth it, right? We think humans have been enjoying pie since the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.
You thought Tyrannosaurus Rex was big. Turns out that they might have been up to 60% bigger than we thought—we’re talking 33,000 pounds or roughly the size of four orcas. (But only 1/10 the size of a living blue whale.)
Image credit: Puwadol Jaturawutthichai/Alamy Stock Photo. Source. A 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite may reveal the origin of water on Earth. You know, that liquid we all need to survive but that none of us drink enough of.
A 500 million-year-old mystery about the innovators behind skeletons is close to a solution!
A very valid question: Who really wore togas?
The origins of the Basque language have long been shrouded in mystery. It’s what’s called a linguistic isolate—a language wholly unrelated to other living languages. The finding of the Hand of Irulegi might be shedding light on the language’s origins. It upends everything we currently know about the Vascones, the people who lived in modern-day Basque before the Romans arrived. The hand is thought to depict a linguistic ancestor to modern-day Euskera.
The Hand of Irulegi was discovered in 2021 near Pamplona, Spain. Photo credit: Navarra government/AFP/Getty. Source. Apparently, we have been misunderstanding mummies and mummification for over a hundred years. A new theory suggests it wasn't meant to preserve the body, it was meant to help escort the dead toward divinity.
The history of transgender youth is longer than you think—much longer.
Napoleon’s life is a frequent topic of conversation, but what do you know about his mysterious death in exile?
The Dunscore hoard of Medieval coins might be the largest one ever discovered in Scotland. It contains about 8,400 silver coins that date to the 13th and 14th centuries.
Tons of ammunition were dumped in a lake near Oslo during WWII. The search for them turned up a Medieval shipwreck instead.
