Too busy to read? Watch on YouTube. When did archaeology start? Archaeology started as a discipline in the 18th century. Before the beginning of archaeology as a discipline, there were two types of people that were interested in things from past civilizations. Those were people who liked to collect artifacts, and people who wanted the […]
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Watch on YouTube Why were the Terracotta Warriors buried? They were buried to protect Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in the afterlife. Qin Shi Huang was a very influential ruler of China. He was the first emperor of a unified China and a lot of things were begun in his reign. He
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Watch on YouTube Why is Broadway so long? Before it became a road it was originally the Wickquasgeck trail. Broadway is a street that runs through Manhattan. It is famous for having many of New York’s theaters on it. It is actually much longer than people think and stretches for 53.2 km. It starts at
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Watch on YouTube How was the meter (metre) defined? In 1791 it was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The word “meter” comes from Greek and means “to measure” or “to count.” That’s why the “meter” in speedometer and altimeter doesn’t mean the unit of distance. The
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Watch on Youtube Why is 0 longitude in London? It was used by more than two-thirds of the world’s ships and the USA had decided to use it. The line that runs through Greenwich in London is known as the prime meridian, meaning it is zero degrees longitude. The Earth is divided up into 360
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Watch this on YouTube When did cave paintings first appear? The oldest cave painting found so far is from 50,000 years ago but the oldest known prehistoric art was from 73,000 years ago, painted on a rock. There is a lot more cave art to be found than art outside caves because the caves protect
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Watch on YouTube When did people start wearing wedding rings? Wedding rings have been found dating back as far as 4000 BC. Rings were first used in Egypt by the pharaohs to represent eternity. A ring has no beginning and no end. It also reflects the circular shape of the sun and the moon, both
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What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? They are a series of ancient Jewish manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. The first of the scrolls were found in 1946 by Bedouin shepherds. They were discovered in a cave near to the Dead Sea. The story is that a
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Do the gulags still exist? Technically no, but actually yes. The gulag is not actually a place. We use the expression gulag to refer to a Russian prison, but it is really the name of the government agency that was in charge of the forced labor camps during the Soviet era. The word gulag is
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When did people start using soap? In 2800 BC in Babylonia. Archaeologists have found soap-like materials in clay cylinders that have been dated to 2800 BC. The tablets are inscribed with “fats boiled with ashes”. Soap is first mentioned on a Sumerian clay tablet, which has a formula for how to make it. It says
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