Category: Weird History

In a cemetery in northwestern Poland dating to medieval times, archaeologists recently excavated six corpses buried with stones jammed under their chins or sickles placed across their bodies. Fueled by centuries of folklore about the undead, such measures were taken to prevent “vampires” from rising from the grave and attacking the living. Though an initial hypothesis suggested these men and women were singled out because they were immigrants, researchers have found evidence that contradicts this theory, and points in a different direction.

Legends of “revenance,” or people returning from the dead, have deep roots among human civilizations, stretching all the way back to ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylonia and beyond. As reported in LiveScience, vampire tales have circulated in eastern Europe since at least the 11th century. According to ancient folklore, a person risked becoming a vampire after death if he or she was unbaptized, or killed in some violent manner. People also risked vampirehood if they were outsiders from another area, or if they were among the first to die from an infectious disease.

In fact, the longstanding idea that vampires drink blood may date back to medieval plagues and epidemics, when diseased corpses would remain exposed for extended periods of time. Gases inside the decomposing body would cause bloating, and force blood up through the lungs and esophagus and into the mouth. Those people unfamiliar with such biological processes may have seen corpses in this state and believed they had grown fat from feasting on human blood.

In 17th and 18th century Poland, people performed apotropaic funerary rites, intended to guard against evil, for those people who they suspected might become vampires after death. These included placing the sharp, curved farming tools called sickles across their bodies, or lodging large rocks under their chins. The idea was that if the person did rise from the dead, the sharp blade of the sickle would decapitate him, while the rocks would pin his jaw shut and prevent him from preying on the living.

Researchers in the new study, whose findings were published in the journal PLOS One, looked at 60 of the 333 burials found at the Drawsko cemetery in northwestern Poland. Six of these were the so-called “Polish vampire” burials, which were not concentrated in the same area of the cemetery, suggesting they were not buried at the same time. To determine the origin of the people buried at Drawsko, researchers analyzed the decay of strontium isotopes in the tooth enamel of the corpses. (Because each locale has a unique ratio of strontium isotopes, and people’s bodies naturally take in elements from their environment, scientists can determine where a person is from by analyzing their strontium isotope ratios.) When they compared the ratios of the Drawsko corpses with those of local animals, they found that they were similar, meaning it was highly unlikely the supposed vampires were migrants from outside the region.

Since none of the bodies showed any signs of having died in a violent manner, and they were found to be natives of the area where they were buried, the researchers concluded that these men and women may have been stigmatized for another reason: They may have been among the first victims of repeated cholera epidemics that swept the region during the 17th and 18th centuries. Spread through contaminated drinking water, cholera can kill its victims in days or even hours, and such a quick death would explain why no marks were left on the bones.

In medieval times, when people lacked a scientific explanation of how cholera and other such infectious diseases spread, they were likely to chalk it up to vampires or other supernatural causes. As study co-author Lesley Gregoricka, a bioarchaeologist at the University of South Alabama, told the New York Times: “Cholera was attributed to the supernatural…They believed people would return from the dead, feed on living individuals and cause the disease to spread.”

The Corkscrew Tank was developed by the Russians and was mostly used during the Cold War.  The corkscrew design made it ideal for use in the extreme winters, as it didn’t get bogged down in snow and ice like other vehicles.  It was even able to travel sideways, which helped when it got stuck.

Strangely enough, the Corkscrew Tank was unable to efficiently travel over normal terrain.  It was extremely effective for navigating the frozen tundra, but couldn’t do much outside of that.  The vehicle also had difficult being steered as the screws couldn’t be aimed from side to side.  There was no suspension on the tank which also complicated things.

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall began to fall, American artist Jim Sanborn was busy working on his Kryptos sculpture, a cryptographic puzzle wrapped in a riddle that he created for the CIA’s headquarters and that has been driving amateur and professional cryptographers mad ever since.

To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades.

The 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture on the grounds of the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, contains four encrypted messages carved out of the metal, three of which were solved years ago. The fourth is composed of just 97 letters, but its brevity belies its strength. Even the NSA, whose master crackers were the first to decipher other parts of the work, gave up on cracking it long ago. So four years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”—a revelation that many took to be a reference to the Berlin Wall.

To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”—that may or may not throw a wrench in this theory. Now the Kryptos sleuths just have to unscramble the remaining 86 characters to find out.

Sanborn hass always been fascinated by Berlin’s many clocks but the Berlin Clock in particular has intrigued him the most. The clock, also known as the Berlin Uhr or Set Theory Clock, was designed in the 1970s by inventor and tinkerer Dieter Binninger. It displays the time through illuminated colored blocks rather than numbers and requires the viewer to calculate the time based on a complex scheme.

“Clock” could easily refer instead to a method devised by a Polish mathematician and cryptologist during World War II to crack Germany’s Enigma ciphers—a method that was expanded on by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park who are credited with ultimately cracking Enigma.

[Read more at The NYTimes]

Huge mysterious stone circles in the Middle East have been aerially imaged and categorized for the first time.

Although first discovered in the 1920s, early accounts of the ancient structures were largely ignored. It is only in the last 10 years that archaeologists have initiated a wider investigation into the number and purpose of the stone circles.

The results of the survey were surprising: there were more giant stone circles, many more, than previously known. They were made of rock and about a meter in height. In all, 12 circles were found in Jordan, another in Syria and two more in southeastern Turkey. Despite the distance separating the circles, they’re strikingly similar, said David Kennedy, the archaeologist for the Aerial Photographic Archive For Archaeology in the Middle East.

Where did they come from? What purpose did they serve and for whom? “I can’t even pretend to know what the answers are,” he said. It is likely that the forms at least pre-date the Roman empire and could possibly even be prehistoric. See more at Live Science.

[via Live Science]

What if life in the Americas was much more awesome than in Europe before Columbus arrived? A fascinating 2002 article from The Atlantic archives speculates that conditions in the native empires of North, Central, and South America were superior to the world Columbus left behind.

The interesting possibility of massive civilizations with a total population greater than Europe is proposed based on a reexamination of historical census counts and new evidence of extraordinary terraforming projects.

Old census counts estimated the native population of the Americas to be between 10-15 million individuals; however, those surveys may have missed a crucial fact… Explorers were in contact with the indigenous population well before settlers actually became established. These initial points of contact are theorized to have spread European diseases like wildfire – killing off 90 to 95% of native peoples before the first census estimates were conducted.

It’s no wonder that as colonists moved west from the Atlantic coasts the whole place seemed deserted. Historical accounts of abandoned earthen projects larger than the Great Pyramids hinted at massive civilizations wiped from the Earth well before most Columbus and other European conquerors arrived to mop up what their various plagues left behind. New research even suggests that some of the most recognizable geographic features of the Western hemisphere may have been deliberately planned: the Great Plains of North America created and maintained with controlled burns, and the Amazon Rain Forest created through planting and soil cultivation.

Read more at The Atlantic. (Its long but very interesting.) Also check out the book 1491 by Charles Mann.

Happy Columbus Day!