Replica of a painting from the Chauvet cave in the Anthropos Museum, Brno.
Wikimedia Commons
Martin Puchner’s engaging new history argues that every culture has its backstory of influences
Invasion Day Reflection and smoking ceremony on parliament steps, Melbourne.
Wikimedia Commons
Truth-telling between First Nations and non-Indigenous people is a vital step in recognising past colonial wrongdoing. And research has found it is also a step towards self-determination and healing.
Iconic California from a 1920s orange box label.
Covina Citrus Industry Photographs
From semitropical playgrounds to life-endangering climate risks: Going back over a century, California’s and Florida’s growth has been predicated on climate – and promises of the good life.
Cholera, Le Petite Journal (1912).
Bibliothèque nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons
No matter how much we believe our knowledge and our technological capabilities have evolved, pandemics prove we are still at the mercy of the natural world.
Shutterstock/Canva/Holly Squire
Using urine in pregnancy testing dates as far back as ancient Egypt.
Phrenology images from Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902).
Public Domain Review
From pulling faces to reading the bumps on your head, these historic leisure activities could be handy for a rainy summer day.
Our First Tiff by Robert Walker Macbeth (1878).
Walker Art Gallery
In the 19th century, it was impossible to get a London paper to distant towns or cities by breakfast. This gave local newspapers an advantage in distribution.
Interned Japanese having lunch at their camp at Woolenook Bend, South Australia, 1944.
State Library South Australia
98% of Australia’s Japanese population were sent to internment camps during the second world war.
EPA/Fabio Frustaci
Brothers of Italy want streets named after fascist figures and the far-right’s ‘contribution’ to democracy recognised on national days of memory.
Yoshiko Kawashima, Felix Kersten and Friedrich Weinreb.
Sven Appel/Wikimedia Commons
Collaborators cannot be reduced to single types. Their motivations are varied and can be hard to interpret.
Shutterstock
Ancient stories of the sea and the sky date back to the end of the last ice age.
Noblewomen eating ice cream in a French caricature, (1801).
Gallica
Chicken pâté was mixed with gravy, gelatine and whipped cream, before being frozen in decorative cups.
A relief depicting a row of captives, carved into the Sun Temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt.
Richard Maschmeyer/ Design Pics via Getty Images
There was no one type of slavery in ‘biblical’ or ‘ancient’ societies, given how varied they were. But much of what historians know about slavery during those eras is horrific.
Illustration of the graves by Mirosław Kuźma.
Leszek Gardeła
The findings suggest that the depth of the relationships Viking-age people had with animals have been dramatically underrepresented.
The use of the letter x as a mathematical unknown is a relatively modern convention. Algebra has been around for a lot longer.
Daryl Benson/Stockbyte via Getty Images
How did the letter x get its enduring role as a symbol of the unknown? A mathematician explains why it’s hard to say for sure.
Disney/ Wikipedia
The Antikythera Mechanism is an actual ancient Greek object that tracked the cycles of the Sun, the Moon and the planets against the stars.
The flag of the 26th of July Movement painted on the wall of a house in Havana, Cuba.
Agencja Fotograficzna Caro / Alamy Stock Photo
The 26 of July Movement became a central part of the movement that emerged triumphant in early January 1959.
Recent heat waves underscore Earth’s new climate state.
Sean Gladwell via Getty Images
Long before thermometers, nature left its own temperature records. A climate scientist explains how ongoing global warming compares with ancient temperatures.
Water and sediment pour off the melting margin of the Greenland ice sheet.
Jason Edwards/Photodisc via Getty Images
The soil was extracted during the Cold War from beneath one of the U.S military’s most unusual bases, then forgotten for decades.
Universal
The subject of the new Christoper Nolan film, Robert Oppenheimer, is often placed next to Albert Einstein as the 20th century’s most famous physicist.