Secret HistoryS


Fire

Massive eruption at Mount Etna in 1669 killed thousands

Mount Etna
Mount Etna
The biggest eruption in Mount Etna's history began on 8th March 1669, causing horrifying devastation to the island of Sicily.

Mount Vesuvius may be Italy's most infamous volcano, thanks in large part to its cataclysmic eruption in 79 CE, yet Etna is the country's most active. Records document eruptions by the massive volcano dating as far back as 1500 BCE. In the last hundred years alone 73 eruptions have been recorded there.

Etna is an ominous sight on the Sicilian skyline, towering above the city of Catania with a peak some 3,300 metres above sea level. The volcano is the result of the meeting of the European and African tectonic plates, stresses of the continents' collision forcing one under the other and causing a subduction zone.

On 8th March 1669 Etna started rumbling. A series of eruptions over the following weeks would see an estimated 20,000 people killed by the volcano.

Dig

Stunning 700-year-old giant cave used by Knights Templar found behind a rabbit hole beneath a farmer's field in Britain

 stunning labyrinth
© Michael Scott/ Caters NewsThe stunning labyrinth is lit with candles
The cave, beneath a farmer's field in Shropshire, was used by the medieval religious order that fought in the Crusades and these stunning images were captured by photographer Michael Scott

Info

"The salt of the earth": A precious commodity throughout history

Salt
All through history the availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. Humans have always tended to build communities either around sources of salt, or where they can trade for it.

In Britain, the suffix "-wich" in a placename means it was once a source of salt, as in Sandwich and Norwich.

The Natron Valley was a key region that supported the Egyptian Empire to its north, because it supplied it with a kind of salt that came to be called by its name, natron.

What is now thought to have been the first city in Europe is Solnitsata, in Bulgaria, which was a salt mine, providing the area now known as the Balkans with salt since 5400 BC.

Even the name Solnisata means "salt works".

Comment: See also:
Salt has been an integral part of civilization dating back as far as 6050 B.C. It has been such an important element of life that it has been the subject of many stories, fables and folktales and is frequently referenced in fairy tales.

It served as currency at various times and places, and it has even been the cause of bitter warfare. Offering bread and salt to visitors, in many cultures, is traditional etiquette.

Aside from all of the uses that salt performs in terms of baking, food flavor and food preservation, salt has a number of other uses that you may never have thought of.



Radar

Before radar, Britain used giant concrete "sound mirrors" to detect incoming enemy aircraft during World War II

Radar system
Scottish physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt invented the first practical radar system back in 1935. The system used pulsed radio waves, and it could detect airplanes up to 100 miles away.

A few years later, a chain of radar stations was established throughout England, which helped defend the British and played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II. It was a huge discovery and the inventor Sir Robert Watson-Watt was knighted for it in 1942.

But what about the period before the radar was invented? What was the forerunner of radar and how the British defended themselves from the German Zeppelins during World War I?

Dig

More rare ingots from sunken ship found off the coast of Sicily

ancient helmets
Researchers have recovered yet more ingots, possibly of the fabled metal orichalcum, from a ship that sank off the coast of Sicily around 2,600 years ago. The find has led some to ponder whether the mythical island of Atlantis, where the legendary alloy was supposed to have been created, was real. The shipwreck, however, dates to about seven millennia later than the legend of Atlantis.

In 2015, researchers diving near the shipwreck found 39 ingots of a copper, zinc, and charcoal alloy that resembles brass. They believe it may be the ancient metal orichalcum. The new cache of the same metal consists of 47 ingots.

While the metal is rare, it is not as precious as researchers expected from reading ancient Greek philosopher Plato's description of it in the Critias dialogue. Plato said only gold was a more precious substance than orichalcum.

Info

Utah's Nine Mile Canyon: World's longest & oldest 'art gallery' filled with tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs

Nine Mile Canyon
The Nine Mile Canyon is located deep in the Utah desert in the Western United States. It is known as "the world's longest art gallery" because is filled with tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs, some over a thousand years old.

Most of the art was created by the Fremont culture and the Ute people. This unique canyon is an international treasure.

Dig

Researchers discover ancient skulls that may belong to Deniso­vans

skulls
© Z. Li et al.Fossil fragments (yellow) were put together with their mirror-image pieces (purple) to visualize the skull of an archaic human who lived in eastern China.
Since their discovery in 2010, the ex­tinct ice age humans called Deniso­vans have been known only from bits of DNA, taken from a sliver of bone in the Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia. Now, two partial skulls from eastern China are emerging as prime candidates for showing what these shadowy people may have looked like.

In a paper published this week in Science, a Chinese-U.S. team presents 105,000- to 125,000-year-old fossils they call "archaic Homo." They note that the bones could be a new type of human or an eastern variant of Neandertals. But although the team avoids the word, "everyone else would wonder whether these might be Denisovans," which are close cousins to Neandertals, says paleo­anthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

The new skulls "definitely" fit what you'd expect from a Denisovan, adds paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres of the University College London—"something with an Asian flavor but closely related to Neandertals." But because the investigators have not extracted DNA from the skulls, "the possibility remains a speculation."

Sherlock

It's time for UK children to learn the very ugly truth about British Empire

India Viceroy Linlithgow British Empire
© Getty Images24th June 1939: The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow (1887 - 1952), with his wife Lady Linlithgow
Millions were displaced and countless murdered in India, as folk - who had lived peacefully - turned on each other.

The Viceroy's House, a feature film by Gurinder Chadha, director of the joyous Bend it like Beckham, is out on general release in March. It is a beautifully made, devastating expose of Winston Churchill's dirty tricks as India gained independence in August 1947.

The country was partitioned, millions displaced, and countless murdered, as folk, who had lived peacefully, turned on each other. Ever since then our historians and film and TV programme makers have framed this savagery in religious terms: Intemperate Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims slaughtered each other because they could not share the land.

Info

Early human fossils suggest intermixing

Two partial skulls
© Xiu-Jie WuTwo partial skulls (shown here in a digital reconstruction) of an early human were discovered at an archaeological site (shown here) in Xuchang in central China.
Fossils unearthed in China appeared to be strange patchworks of extinct and modern human lineages, with the large brains of modern humans; the low, broad skulls of earlier humans; and the inner ears of Neanderthals, a new study reported.

These new fossils suggest that far-flung groups of ancient humans were more genetically linked across Eurasia than often previously thought, researchers in the new study said.

"I don't like to think of these fossils as those of hybrids," said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "Hybridization implies that all of these groups were separate and discrete, only occasionally interacting. What these fossils show is that these groups were basically not separate. The idea that there were separate lineages in different parts of the world is increasingly contradicted by the evidence we are unearthing."

Modern humans first appeared in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and recent archaeological and genetic findings suggest that modern humans first migrated out of Africa starting at least 100,000 years ago.

However, a number of earlier groups of so-called archaic humans left Africa beforehand; for instance, Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia between about 200,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The fragmentary nature of the human fossil record has made it tricky to determine the biology of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia, Trinkaus said. Unearthing details from this region could shed light on an otherwise poorly understood aspect of human evolution, yielding insights into how modern and archaic humans interacted, he added.

Cloud Precipitation

Heavy flooding unearths 14th century tombstones in Iran

Iran Cemetery medieval
© Sputnik/ Eduard Pesov
In southern Iran, tablets and tombstones from the 13th-14th centuries were unearthed due to severe flooding that hit several Iranian provinces in mid-February.

Seasonal flooding and the erosion of the riverbed of a local river, caused by recent heavy rains, revealed an old cemetery in the vicinity of a holy shrine in Jouyom, a town in Larestan County in Fars Province, Iranian Students News Agency reported. The information was confirmed by Khoshayar Shibani, the head of the local office of Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handcrafts and Tourism at a press conference.

​"Apparently, the graveyard dates back to the 7th century of the lunar calendar (13th — 14th century AD)," Shibani told reporters. He also added that local inhabitants had only accepted Islam in the 9th century AD, so most of the historical monuments found near Jouyom reflect the cultural heritage of Islam.