The Past
All Stories
Brian C. Muraresku, New York Times best-selling author of “The Immortality Key,” unpacks ancient evidence for the widespread ritual use of psychoactive plants.
Researchers discovered something modern humans had never before seen—a flashy Neanderthal horn collection.
Humiliating powerful people was not a key to success.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
From landscaped gardens to road systems, the Persians were among the first to create many things we still enjoy today.
Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel.
The 1,200-year-old “Book of Ingenious Devices” contains designs for futuristic inventions like gas masks, water fountains, and digging machines.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
Democratic freedom, rapturous religion, and newspapers created a hotbed for social experimentation in 19th-century America.
Whether in Russia or China, the secret police are defined by their unquestioning loyalty — as well as by their poor career prospects.
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Lawmen and outlaws were often the same people.
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Far from practicing witchcraft, the experimentation of medieval alchemists helped bring about the Scientific Revolution.
Some objects were softer than others.
Meet your new flying nightmare: Thapunngaka shawi.
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality.
In many city-states, it was perfectly acceptable for older men to have sexual relationships with young boys.
An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
Wealth concentration among elites was common in ancient nations, but the scale on which it took place in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty was unprecedented.
He was also a eugenicist — but at least he could draw pretty pictures.
The Athenian rich paid their taxes because they craved the social success of being perceived as “useful.”
The shift from steam to electricity was inevitable — but some foresaw it earlier than others.
Seneca thought the use of ice was a “true fever of the most malignant kind.”
“The Da Vinci Code” popularized the idea that Christians stole much of their theology. It’s wrong, especially regarding Christmas.
Ada Lovelace’s skills with language, music, and needlepoint all contributed to her pioneering work in computing.
A Cambridge Ph.D. student has solved a grammatical problem that has befuddled Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC.
The most important events in history have nothing to do with politics or wars.