Very close to the French town of Montesquieu-Avantés, in the Midi-Pyrénées region, and to the Tuc d’Audoubert cave with its fantastic prehistoric clay bisons, is the cave of the Trois Frères (Three Brothers). Both are part of an underground system of three caves formed by the river Volp (the third one is the Enlène cave). […]
History
The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations. (E.H. Carr)
Posted inModern Era
The Chinese woman who became queen of piracy with a fleet of hundreds of ships
The classic image we have of piracy is that of a masculine and Caribbean world, something that would have to be quite nuanced. Firstly, because although it is true that buccaneers and filibusters operated basically in the Caribbean and its surroundings, it is also true that piracy is probably one of the oldest occupations in […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
How two Byzantine princesses scandalized Europe by using a fork
A few years ago I was invited to dinner by some Bengali friends and when we sat down what was my surprise to see that there was a knife but no fork, even though the menu was based on rice and chicken. They used their hands to eat it and, wherever you go, do what […]
Posted inSecond World War
Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the Soviet woman who paid for the manufacture of a tank and drove it personally to avenge her husband’s death
Although women’s participation in World War II was more active than it may seem at first glance, their role was primarily in the rearguard, working in the war industry or in auxiliary positions in logistics, for example. Of course, there was no shortage of cases of female partisans and guerrillas, but the almost absolute protagonism […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
The plan of Saint Gall, the largest known architectural drawing of the High Middle Ages that was never built
The abbey of Saint Gall ( Sankt Gallen in German) was founded in the year 613 in the town that today bears his name in Switzerland by an Irish monk, Gallus of Hibernia. It would be one of the main Benedictine monasteries in Europe for many centuries. It flourished under the patronage of Pepin the […]
Posted inModern Era
North American Plains Sign Language, older than European and Ottoman Sign Languages
We often see in Westerns how Indians manage to communicate with each other or with the white man through a series of hand gestures, sometimes accompanied by a phonetic transcription with the infinitive cliché introduced by Fenimore Cooper in his novel The Last of the Mohicans. Such a transcription should be unnecessary, although it is […]
Posted inModern Era
Gonzalo Guerrero, the Spanish castaway who became a Mayan and fought against the conquistadors
When we talk about miscegenation in reference to the ethnic and cultural fusion that the conquest of America by the Spanish meant, there is a character that embodies it almost emblematically. He is Gonzalo Guerrero, a shipwrecked man who, after years of living with a Mayan tribe, became naturalized, formed a family and even fought […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
Gutisko Razda, the language spoken by the Visigoths
Visigoths were a branch of the Goths, who in turn belonged to the East Germanic tribes that between 600 and 300 BC migrated from Scandinavia to the region between the Oder and Vistula rivers. Some researchers believe that the Visigoths are the same people as the Thervingi, as the sixth century AD historian Jordanes says […]
Posted inArt, Modern Era
The scientist who captured the Russian Empire in colour photographs before they were invented
Photography has improved so much, technologically speaking, that today we see images from only twenty years ago and they almost seem prehistoric to us; in fact, many people probably don’t even know what rolls were or how the processing was done. It would be even worse if we go back a little further, to black […]
Posted inModern Era
John Taylor, the oculist who blinded Bach and Händel
If I asked you what Bach and Händel had in common, there would be more than one answer. They were both famous composers, born in the same year and originally from what is now Germany. However, there is another thing that links them: they both died practically blind because of eye operations performed on them […]
