The Gospel of Judas caused a huge stir when National Geographic published it back in 2006. But to this day, misconceptions about this text abound. Who wrote this text? And what does it really say?
The Actual Origins Of Clothing
Most people put on their outfits every day without questioning the history of clothing as they do it. You're clearly not one of these people, since you've landed on this page! Here's a list of things we still wear today and why we started wearing them. The history of clothing is a very strange story with a lot of twists and turns.
America's Great Indian Nations - Full Length Documentary
This is the first comprehensive history of six great Indian nations, dramatically filmed on location at their native tribal lands across America, using reenactments, archival footage, maps and original music. The story of the Iroquois, Seminole, Shawnee, Navajo, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux nations unfolds in their struggle to protect their lands, cultures, and freedoms.
The Persians & Greeks
In which John compares and contrasts Greek civilization and the Persian Empire. Of course, we're glad that Greek civilization spawned modern western civilization, right? Maybe not. From Socrates and Plato to Darius and Xerxes, John explains two of the great powers of the ancient world, all WITHOUT the use of footage from 300.
Geneticists Have Found Traces Of Biblical Figures Hidden In The DNA Of Modern Populations
An international team of genetic experts examined the ancient dna extracted from 93 individuals. all these people died over 1500 years at five different sites in the middle east. all of them were part of the canaanite civilization, which thrived for some 4700 years up until around 1200 bce. however, what surprises the scientists is the length they can now make between these ancient biblical people and their modern-day descendants. geneticists have found traces of biblical figures hidden in the dna of modern populations. the canaanites lived in the lands that lie between modern egypt in historic mesopotamia, which stretched in an arc from the persian gulf to the mediterranean, mesopotamia covered parts of the modern southwest asian countries of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Kuwait. the canaanites lived in what today is now Israel, as well as in parts of modern Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
In the Bible, the Book of Genesis states that the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth. And ham is the father of Canaan. The descendants of Canaan according to the biblical account are the people that came to be called the Canaanites. And in a famous passage, the book of Exodus describes a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites. The results of this study of Canaanite genetics were announced in May 2020, and it's the largest of its kind undertaken in the Middle East to date. It's an incredible technical achievement that DNA can now be extracted from such ancient bones. However, what is equally astonishing is what the scientists were able to identify about how Canaanite DNA lives on in a group of people who walk the earth today, before we get into the detail of the connections revealed by the experts between ancient and modern people, let's learn a little more about the Canaanites. untangling the precise origins of these ancient people is a tricky business.
Archaeologists Unearthed A Stone Age Village In Israel That Could Help Rewrite Human History
In the valleys of Jordan, in Israel, archaeologists are excavating the fascinating remnants of an ancient settlement. And as the team recovers relics and artifacts from the site, a startling picture begins to emerge one that's shedding new light on the lives of the humans who lived there over 10,000 years ago. Archaeologists on Earth Day Stone Age village in Israel that could help rewrite human history. Beginning some 2 million years ago, the Stone Age ushered in a time of great change for real humans. Yes, having learned to craft weapons and tools, they took their first steps on the long road to civilization as we know and recognize it today. Having spanned a duration of around 3 million years all told, the Stone Age is now typically broken up into three distinct periods. They are the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic stages. And by the time the great prehistoric period drew to a close, mankind was no longer and nomadic hunter-gatherer.
Instead, we had become relatively sophisticated beings capable of skilled tasks such as working with metal. Today, many aspects of the Stone Age remain a mystery, though. Yet thanks to archaeology, we are always learning more about the world that our ancestors inhabited. Across the globe sites continually reveal incredible relics from this fascinating bygone time. And these discoveries, in turn, give us priceless insights into where we came from, and who we are. For example, the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Scotland's Orkney Islands has allowed experts to reconstruct what life was like more than 5000 years ago, in France. Meanwhile, paleolithic cave paintings have taught us much about early human's approach to culture and art.
Archeologists Scouring Turkey’s Largest Lake Uncovered A Mysterious Long Lost Kingdom
In today’s video we’ll be exploring the incredible discovery of a long lost kingdom that was uncovered by archaeologists in Turkey’s largest lake. This mysterious civilization has left researchers with more questions than answers, and it's sure to be a captivating story.
Awestruck Conquistador Describes Alien World of Tenochtitlan (1519) // Memoir of Bernal Diaz
In the following video we will be exploring the alien world of Tenochtitlan as seen by an awestruck conquistador. Enjoy!
Guerilla Warriors: The Military Tactics Of Native American Tribes
Long before the first Europeans set foot on American soil, the native people who lived there had spent centuries perfecting the art of combat. Even after visitors arrived from across the vast oceans with superior technology and weaponry, Native American guerilla tactics prevailed so thoroughly that the invaders were forced to adopt similar strategies. From the Mourning Wars tactics to the tactics of the French and Indian War, Native American soldiers and scouts proved themselves capable of immense cunning and incredible feats of military prowess.
Things You Didn't Know About Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan remains one of the most feared and respected conquerors of all time. His biography is shrouded in mystery and contradiction, but the facts about Genghis Khan are that he rose up from almost certain death on the Mongolian Steppe, united his people, and began a series of gruesome conquests that killed millions, and changed the entire course of human destiny.
The Life Of An Ancient Spartan | The Spartans
The Spartans chronicles the rise and fall of one of the most extreme civilisations the world has ever witnessed. A civilization that was founded on discipline, sacrifice and frugality where the onus was on the collective and the goal was to create the perfect state, and the perfect warrior.
Why Japanese Longbows Are So Expensive
Longbows, or Yumi, have been used in Japan for centuries. But today, a handmade bamboo bow can cost over $2,000. At over 2 meters tall, these bows are difficult to handle. And making them is just as challenging. Kanjuro Shibata carves raw bamboo and inserts over 100 wedges to curve the bow. So how are these bows made? And why are they so expensive?
The History of the Grim Reaper & the Deities of Death Around the World
Today we're taking a look the origin and history of the Grim Reaper as well as a look at the various deities and spirits of death from around the world. Enjoy!
Dyeus: The Indo-European Sky Father
In this video, we explore the Proto-Indo-European Sky Father. A deity revered by many cultures throughout history. From the Greek Zeus to the Roman Jupiter, the Sky Father god represented the celestial day-lit sky.
5 Surprising Differences Between Ashkenazi & Sephardic Jews
Oftentimes, Jewish people depicted in the media typically appear to be of European descent, yet most Jews don’t fit into this category.
While the two largest groups of Jews in North America are Ashkenazi Jews from countries like Germany, France and Eastern Europe, and Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain, there are also Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East, Ethiopian Jews, and so many more across the globe.
Although there are many differences between these groups such as the languages they speak, the foods they eat, or even the Jewish customs and traditions they keep, they all share the core connection of Judaism and are a part of one peoplehood.
Archeologists find 5,000-year-old giants in China
Many of the 5,000 year-old skeletons measured 5’ 9” or longer, making the Neolithic humans exceptionally tall for that period.
In 2016, archaeologists began excavating a late Neolithic settlement in Jiaojia, a village in China’s Shandong province. They have unearthed a trove of fascinating finds there—including the ruins of 104 houses, 205 graves, and 20 sacrificial pits—but a recent discovery has taken experts by surprise. As Mark Molloy reports for the Telegraph, a graveyard in Jiaojia was found to contain the bodies of several men who were 5'9'' or taller. That might not seem like anything to write home about, but the men would have been exceptionally tall for the period in which they lived.
The remains, which date to about 5,000 years ago, were buried in large tombs. One of the individuals found in the graveyard was even taller than his leggy peers, measuring approximately 6'2'' or 1.9 meters.
"This is just based on the bone structure,” Fang Hui, head of Shandong University's school of history and culture, tells China Daily. “If he was a living person, his height would certainly exceed 1.9 meters."
Hui didn’t provide specific details about the average height of Neolithic populations living in what is now modern-day China, but Molloy writes that the men in the Jiaojia graveyard “would have seemed like giants to the average person 5,000 years ago.” In Europe, for context’s sake, the average height of Neolithic populations was about 5'5'' (1.67 meters), according to the publication Our World in Data.
Researchers have theorized that the men grew to (relatively) towering heights because they were high-status individuals who had access to better food than most of their contemporaries. The large tombs that housed the bodies certainly suggest that their occupants were wealthy. The theory would also explain why some of the remains, along with pottery and jade artifacts found within the tomb, appear to have been deliberately broken.
“The damage may have been done not long after the burials and may be due to power struggles among high-ranking people,” China Daily reports.
The people of Shandong province consider height to be a defining attribute, though vertically speaking, the men found in the Jiaojia graveyard still wouldn't have been in league with Shandong’s most famous son. Legend has it, Confucius, a native of the region, is said to have reached a height of 9'6".
History of Japan
In the following video we will be exploring the history of Japan. Watch the video to find out more and enjoy!
3300-Year-Old Baboon Skull Is Thought To Have Come From The Lost Land Of Punt
According to Ancient Egyptian legends, the Land of Punt was a mysterious kingdom covered in tropical vegetation, inhabited by exotic animals and rich in treasures, including gold, gemstones, frankincense and myrrh. Modern archaeological evidence suggests that Punt was more than just a legend, but for over 150 years, Punt has been a geographic mystery as nobody could pinpoint its exact location.
In 1858, French archaeologist Auguste Ferdinand François Mariette interpreted a stone relief discovered in the temple of Deir el-Bahari, the mortuary temple build for the famous Queen Hatshepsut, as a realistic depiction of an expedition by ship to the remote Land of Punt. Based on the display of exotic animals and plants, like leopards, apes, giraffes and myrrh trees, some researchers argued that Punt was located somewhere in East Africa or maybe even on the Arabian Peninsula.
The Egyptians first began to travel to Punt about 4500 years ago and continued to do so for more than 1000 years. But although written records and artworks list the many products the Egyptians brought back from Punt - precious resins, metals like gold, silver and electrum, tropical wood, exotic plants and even living animals - scientists have found little hard evidence of these goods in the archaeological record.
In a 2020 study Nathaniel Dominy, a primatologist at Dartmouth College, and colleagues analyzed chemical traces of a baboon skull hosted in the collection of the British Museum, providing direct evidence that the living animal was brought back to Egypt from Punt.
The remains belong to a hamadryas baboon discovered by 19th-century archaeologists in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. This primate is not native to Egypt, but based on the Deir el-Bahari relief, showing baboons climbing around on the returning ship, this species actually lived in Punt. The hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas) is a species of baboon native to the Horn of Africa and the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
The researchers studied chemical isotopes in the baboon’s tooth enamel for clues to the animal’s birthplace. The soil and water in a region have a distinctive ratio of strontium, hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, depending on the underlying geology. By drinking water from springs and feeding on plants growing there, animals will accumulate those isotopes in their bones and teeth. Teeth form in the first years of an animal’s life and the isotopic signature of the tooth enamel remains unchanged even if the animal later moves to a foreign land.
The strontium ratio in the tooth enamel confirmed that the baboon found in ancient Thebes had not been born in Egypt. Instead, an analysis of strontium ratios in 31 modern baboons from across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggests the animal was born in an area stretching across modern-day Eritrea, Ethiopia, and northwest Somalia.
That’s where most archaeologists think Punt was located and thus implies the baboon is the first known Puntite treasure, Dominy says.
Fall of The Roman Empire...in the 15th Century
In which John Green teaches you about the fall of the Roman Empire, which happened considerably later than you may have been told. While the Western Roman Empire fell to barbarians in 476 AD, the Byzantines in Constantinople continued the Eastern Empire nicely, calling themselves Romans for a further 1000 years. Find out what Justinian and the rest of the Byzantine emperors were up to over there, and how the Roman Empire dragged out its famous Decline well into medieval times. In addition to all this, you'll learn about ancient sports riots and hipster barbarians, too.
36,000-year-old Meat of a Mummified Bison was used for a Stew
The steppe bison, also known as the steppe wisent, was a species that once roamed the mammoth steppe. This giant grassy area spanned from present-day Spain eastward all the way to Canada, and southward from the Arctic islands to China, during the last Ice Age.
Along with ancient horses, wooly mammoths, and wooly rhinoceroses, steppe bison was one of the most common large mammals to inhabit the vast mammoth steppe. Prehistoric paintings in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, which are some of the oldest known examples of human art, feature steppe bison alongside figures of humans and other animals.
These majestic, long-horned creatures went extinct some 8,000 years ago, during the early period of the Holocene — the current geological epoch. They gave rise to modern species of bison, including the American bison.
During the Klondike Gold Rush, which occurred in the late 1890s, as many as 100,000 miners and prospectors from all over the United States headed to Alaska and to the Canadian federal territory of Yukon to take part in extensive gold mining operations.
At that time, many miners stumbled upon ancient fossils and incomplete remains of prehistoric mammals, but the paleontological value of such findings was usually overlooked: most of the relics ended up discarded or taken home as souvenirs by the workers.
However in 1976, long after the gold rush had ended, the Rumans, a family of miners, discovered an incredibly preserved carcass of a male steppe bison embedded in ice near the city of Fairbanks, Alaska.
They named it Blue Babe, in reference to Babe the Blue Ox, the mythical companion of the American folk figure Paul Bunyan, a giant lumberjack. Thankfully, the family immediately realized that their discovery might be exceptional, so they called Dale Guthrie, a paleontologist from the University of Alaska.
Guthrie and his team managed to melt the thick layer of ice and excavate the carcass, and they quickly realized that they had encountered one of the most preserved specimens of steppe bison ever found.
A radiocarbon analysis of a piece of the animal’s skin showed that it had died approximately 36,000 years ago. While examining several wounds on the bison’s neck and back, the researchers determined that it had most likely been killed by an American lion, a subspecies of the long-extinct Ice Age lion, the ancient ancestor of the modern African lion.
This had probably occurred in winter; extreme cold had quickly caused the dead bison to freeze, and the vultures thus couldn’t destroy its remains. Over the following thousands of years, layers of ice and snow covered the carcass and it silently waited for someone to discover it, almost completely intact.
Guthrie’s research team put a lot of effort into preserving the dead bison in its initial state so that it could be permanently exhibited at the University of Alaska Museum. They even sought the help of Eirik Granqvist, the chief taxidermist for the Zoological Museum of the University of Helsinki, Finland, who used his expert taxidermy skills to completely restore the remains and prevent them from decomposing. During the process, the team even managed to extract some of the animal’s blood and bone marrow.
By mid-1984, the specimen was ready to be exhibited. In order to celebrate their success, Guthrie and his team decided to do something rather unorthodox: they removed some meat from the bison’s neck and used it to prepare a stew.
According to Guthrie, the meat was tough and somewhat hard to chew, but also quite delicious, resembling ordinary beef. Also, since nobody experienced any nausea or digestive problems, the 36,000-year-old meat was evidently quite edible. Blue Babe can be seen displayed in the Gallery of Alaska at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.
