Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

Northwick park hospital london has one!

The first automatic toaster (I want one but not the death trap this one is.......)

Absolutely. But mainstream media needs to be challenged too. For example 'The Dig' reduced female archeologist Peggy Piggot to a young, pretty and lovestruck character who was chosen for the job because she was light and delicate. In reality, she was a highly respected, published archeologist who had already been in charge of digs.
They invented a male photographer to be her love interest erasing the two women who actually did the job - commended at the time for producing the first ever detailed, coloured documentation for an excavation project.
To create an audience- friendly trope, film makers/writers eliminated three fascinating and talented women.

Heartbreakingly, I am sure that you are right.

These few precious things - things that reminded them of previous life, of those they love, of their humanity - taken from them and put aside. "You have nothing now. You are nothing now. This is your life"

God - how dreadful.

The history of food. It's such a fundamental thing - we literally need it to live - and yet it says so much about us: our societal status and what we want to say about ourselves, our background, our culture, fads and fashions, scientific developments, political policy, education and public health...

Other things that fascinate me: space (especially nebulas), timeslips, mycorrhizal networks (as PPs have said, this includes how trees can communicate, I recommend Suzanne Simard's "Finding the Mother Tree"), clouds and weather (I mean, how does the wind blow?) and lots of lots of history. The latter includes the Mitfords, London, periods of change and transition, the Georgian era, the Underground, and the history of my house. Occasionally I find an old picture hook or a fragment of wallpaper and it fascinates me. I think it's social history that grasps my attention: how did we live and why?

I have ridiculously eclectic interests and often find myself down a rabbit hole. I'm off to read up on Mitochondrial Eve now!

In Bill Bryson's book about Shakespeare he says that during analysis of his idiolect, they have discovered that he hardly ever uses the word "also," and where he rarely does, the person saying it is a bit of a twat. He obviously had a downer on the word. But the other authors like Bacon and Marlowe, who are rumoured to have actually written the plays, use the word in a normal distribution and in the same way as we do.

Saved this thread late last night as I knew I’d get drawn in if I went further than the Foundling Museum.
Less exciting than many other posts here but I saw this photo earlier today. Obviously had to go look it up. www.instagram.com/p/BGZ7VwbvG6H/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Our property is well known and in a local museums
Archaeologists had been allowed on land near us and had noted that they had never been allowed access to our property and land. ( We we’re told this at the local history centre ) I say land it’s not huge, just an acre now.
When we bought it we asked if they’d like to dig.

We ve had about 20 here every summer for the past few years.
They’re back again this year.

Wonderful! How did you come to have archaeologists - did you find something during renovations, invite them in randomly, or just wake up one morning to find your garden crisscrossed with trenches?

The last recipient of a US civil war pension died in 2020. WTF?

I don't understand at all how memory works, especially when there is a quiz question of which you know you know the answer but have forgotten it for the moment. How does that work? Why can't you just remember it? Or just forget it, but how on earth do you know that you know the answer but habe just forgotten it tenporarily? It's insane.

Why do you think there are so few records about him?

As Halsall says, it was a long time ago. We know almost nothing about most people from then - Shakespeare is better recorded than most.

how did the Syrians and the Egyptians and the Maya and the Inca all come up with the same ideas?

Making a building that is wider at the base than the top is just logical. Dump a pile of sand out of a bucket and you get a basic pyramid. Physics, observation, and experiments with doing it the other way up being spectacular failures, mean there is no need to posit alien intervention for the invention of pyramids.

If multiple civilisations had been building geodesic domes, or things like this, lh6.googleusercontent.com/_LK3Jc8YZXjs/TAhsII68hKI/AAAAAAAAX7s/mL37hS4sBww/s800/strange-house-13.jpg it might be a more difficult question.

The story of the girl behind the face of CPR dummies:
www.livescience.com/cpr-doll-resusci-annie-face.html

I visited Newgrange nearly 20 years ago and found it fascinating. I enjoyed it much more than Stonehenge, partly because I hadn't previously heard of it.

(OP's title is now slightly ironic given all the talk of periods!)

I've just bought a used copy of The Lodger Shakespeare book. Sounds right up my street. Thanks for mentioning it.

My understanding is that it would be extremely difficult for a woman to prove, without any other witnesses to back her up, that her child was born dead, sadly. I suspect - though I don’t know for sure - that a single woman of the serving classes would automatically be suspected of killing the child. I don’t think that it necessarily follows that they always suffered the ultimate fate; some might have been found innocent and some might have been found guilty but with a ‘recommendation to mercy'.

The fact that some animals have nurseries to look after their little ones.

Wow!

God I love Radio 4! Ditto BBC4.

Christopher Marlowe is another possible.

I know! Oh well humans are obviously far too stupid to have ever thought of and built a pyramid, must have been aliens!

Just because a person was born millenia ago doesn't mean they were stupid!

I listened to a R4 programme on that, about 20 years ago, and recall it was said that the development of accents can be related to landscape, how people would call to one another over distances and how the sounds moved. I'd love to hear it again but doubt it's available now.

I can also recommend The Why Files you tube channel for interesting videos on all sorts of strange, unexplained and historical happenings. He does also does a fair bit of debunking too.

This is an interesting one

@DumpedinKilburn The Lodger - Shakespeare on Silver Street. God, I love that book. There's just so much arcane information in there about Tudor everyday life - I mean, who knew about the people who made head-dresses for the theatre? Now I do.

I think there are so many misunderstandings about Shakespeare not being mentioned in records. He was. But things get destroyed. Manuscripts and records are burned, thrown away, used to butter pie-dishes or back books. We’re talking over 500 years ago. He actually pops up in records all over the place. He just doesn’t appear as people wanted him to appear. They simply couldn’t believe that someone 'ordinary' had the intellect to write those plays and sonnets. So it had to be Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford. James Shapiro is so revelatory on all of this.

@teawamutu
If you’re ever in Guernsey there’s another passage tomb there.
Literally next to the road. They open it the the morning and you can just wander in. No charge.
It a lot smaller than newgrange but there are still remnants of ceiling paintings
Theres another one on a hillside in Guernsey too.It’s very small. Just built into the hill, but it’s a bit of a climb down from the road.

What I find so mysterious is that in 2023 they still don't know how the shroud was made, how it has that facial imprint, Even people who are certain it's a forgery dating from the middle ages can't explain how it was made.