Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

[ElizabethBest]

Let's hear it please - I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole. I'll start - The Willard Suitcases. Over 400 suitcases of possessions were found in an attic at the Willard Insane Asylum belong to patients who had died whilst inpatients so never left. The New York State Museum started a project to document the cases and their contents, and you can learn all about it and see the cases on their website.

@Riverlee Me too. I grew up in an area where a lot of young children went missing in a short space of time, some of whom were found alive, so it was sort of the monster under the bed when I was a child. (don't want to say much more as it's a famous case so v outing!)

@teawamutu ooh I’ve never heard of Newgrange. Googling now! It’s like how they built the pyramids - I mean, just HOW?! And also, how did the Syrians and the Egyptians and the Maya and the Inca all come up with the same ideas?

@awaynboilyurheid It so needs a film! I watched ‘The Lost City of Z’, about Percy Fawcett a few years ago and it was really interesting!

@TortolaParadise going to spend ages looking for him now!

I couldn't believe this was real when I saw it on TV. A pufferfish that makes beautiful sand art to attract a female. The precision is remarkable.

@Halsall there goes my next decade!!

@DumpedinKilburn I went through a phase of being obsessed with Oxford Theory, the incomparable brethren etc - it’s so interesting!! My theory is he’s a bit like James Patterson, or Carolyn M Keene who write the Nancy drew books - it’s a convenient pen name for a collection of writers. (Although I don’t think there ever was a real Carolyn Keene? I think the entire person was made up? It’s been a while!)

The extended mind, it’s and old video but I still find it fascinating. It a nutshell it talks about how you can feel a that you are being watched (so not from your peripheral vision), so how sight is more external than we thing, how dogs know when their owner is returning even from a completely random outing to an unknown destination, how we anticipate the thoughts, movements and actions of others without really knowing why or being able to explain it.

Here is the video

Accents and how they developed. And why. And how quickly.

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.

@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.

@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.

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

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 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!

Christopher Marlowe is another possible.

Wow!

God I love Radio 4! Ditto BBC4.

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

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'.

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

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!)

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.

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.

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

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?