I learned this today. The first evidence for a wedding ceremony between a man and a woman is from Mesopotamia in 2350 BC. In the time of hunter-gatherers, people lived in small groups, probably of about thirty people. Each group would have several male leaders who shared the women. They would all care for and […]
#112 When did people first start getting married? Read More »
I learned this today. The International Prototype of the Kilogram, kept in Paris, is not accurate enough to be the standard for all kilograms around the world. Different measures for different things have been used around the world since people began measuring things. These measurements were usually related to the human body or common things
#108 Why is the official kilogram in France no longer used? Read More »
I learned this today. Adolf Hitler had three brothers, two sisters, one half-brother, and one half-sister. Because of the things he did, it is difficult to see Hitler as a real person, but of course he was, and he has a family. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, to Alois Hitler and Klara
#107 Did Adolf Hitler have any brothers or sisters? Read More »
I learned this today. Vikings is the name given to the seafaring people from Scandinavia who raided through Europe from the late 8th century to the late 11th century. The Vikings didn’t call themselves “Vikings” and the word wasn’t used to refer to all of the people and the time period until the early 18th
#105 Why do we use the word Vikings? Read More »
I learned this today. Shoe sizes in America and the UK are measured in barleycorns. Nobody knows when people first started wearing shoes, but experts think it might have been about 40,000 years ago. The little toe bones of skeletons found after 40,000 years ago are thinner than the bones found before. They deduce that
#103 Why do we use those measurements for shoe sizes? Read More »
I learned this today. The mile we use today originated with the Roman mile which was one thousand paces. The word “mile” comes from “mille passus”, which means 1,000 paces. Ancient measuring systems all began by using body parts to measure things. The oldest unit of length is the Egyptian cubit, although they didn’t call
#102 Why do we use miles as a unit of measurement Read More »
I learned this today. Wire fraud and mail fraud are federal crimes in the United States that concern transferring something connected to fraud by mail, email, phone, radio, or television. To be guilty of wire fraud, somebody must have “voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money” and
#97 What are mail fraud and wire fraud? Read More »
I learned this today. There is evidence of a dentist from 12,000 BC. Before humans took up agriculture, possibly about 12,000 years ago, we were hunter-gatherers and we had less tooth decay than when we became farmers. Researchers were able to extract dental plaque from the teeth of 34 prehistoric European skeletons. Dental plaque is
#96 When was the first dentist? Read More »
I learned this today. In the 1930s, the introduction of the refrigerator into homes put the ice harvesting industry out of business. Any kind of food, be it meat, fish or vegetable, is going to start going bad. Food decays because micro-organisms like bacteria feed on the food. Bacteria use enzymes to break down the
#95 What happened to the ice industry? Read More »
I learned this today. The Rosetta stone helped translate hieroglyphics because it had the same message written in hieroglyphics, the cursive Egyptian script for regular people called demotic, and ancient Greek. The Rosetta stone is a large slab of granodiorite that probably stood in a temple. It has a decree written on it that concerns
#91 How did the Rosetta stone help people decipher hieroglyphics? Read More »
