History

Bonhams will be auctioning the internationally renowned glass collection of A C Hubbard Jr.

Insect "Frankensteins" have been discovered among fossils from a deposit in Brazil. The prehistoric creatures had the wings and middle-body segments of a dragonfly's, wing veins arranged like a mayfly and a praying mantis's forelegs.

A student prank led to British Army and intelligence units being mobilised for fear that aliens were mounting an invasion of England, documents released recently by The National Archives show.

This has to be one of the biggest long shots in history. A retired schoolteacher called Leonard Dawes had been compiling the daily crossword puzzle for London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper for over twenty years.

In the first century AD, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo noted that a peninsula just south of Athens called Piraeus had, at one time in the past, been an island.

Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says. Considered "magical or mysterious" in its time, the writing survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according to researchers.

Visiting the excavations of the Areni-1 cave complex in Armenia, archaeologist Levon Petrosyan contemplates the 6,100-year-old winemaking equipment discovered by an international project co-directed by Boris Gasparyan, Gregory Areshian and Ron Pinhasi.

A newly excavated archaeological site in Alaska contained the cremated remains of one of the earliest inhabitants of North America. The site may provide rare insights into the burial practices of Ice Age people and shed new light on their daily lives.

Multidisciplinary medical identification of a French king’s head (Henri IV) The skeletons of kings and queens lying in mass graves in the Royal Basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris could finally have the solemn funeral ceremonies they deserve, say experts in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com.

In the early 1930s the German Reich were informed by the French Government that it had discharged all the prisoners of war taken during World War I and it must be presumed that all soldiers still missing were dead.