Neanderthals Ate Bugs. Europeans Avoided Them for 9,000 Years.
Western bug aversion may be older than any cultural explanation. New research traces it to inherited biology going back 9,000 years. So is this really just a marketing problem?
History
Medieval Europe Put Pigs, Rats and Weevils on Trial. Cats Were Somehow Above the Law.
Medieval courts tried pigs, rats and weevils for actual crimes. Dogs faced charges regularly. Cats, despite ample provocation, were almost never touched.
A Family Spent 42 Years Hiding From the Soviet Union in Siberia. One of Them Is Still There.
The Lykovs survived Stalin's purges and 42 years of Siberian wilderness, but not first contact.
Roswell Grows Up
The Roswell mythology spent the 2000s losing its key witnesses and its fabricated evidence. Then the government quietly started studying UFOs again. Then it started admitting things. We still don't know what Mac Brazel found.
Dentist Spots Human Jawbone in New Tile Floor
A travertine floor tile. A dentist's trained eye. A jawbone that may have been walking around 1.8 million years ago. How many other renovations ended like this?
The Mythology Machine
Between 1978 and 2000, Roswell transformed from a forgotten local incident into the defining UFO event in American history. Some of that transformation was accidental. Some of it was manufactured by people working for the government, who later confessed.
One Volcano Made 536 the Year the Sun Went Out
A medieval fog, an Icelandic eruption, the Plague of Justinian, and a glacier made 536 a true dark age.
The Long Silence
For 30 years after the 1947 incident, the weather balloon explanation held. Not because it was convincing, but because the government built something to make it hold.
72 Hours in Roswell
On the morning of July 8, 1947, the U.S. Army announced it had captured a flying saucer. By evening, it hadn't. What happened in between, and in the nine days before, is one of the most documented non-explanations in American institutional history.
Roswell: 79 Years of What We Don't Know
From a rancher's debris field in 1947 to a congressional hearing in 2026: the complete arc of the incident that won't stay closed. An interactive timeline covering 38 key events across five eras.
A Cave Full of Strangers, and Not One of Them Is Male
20 Homo naledi fossils. One cave. Zero males. Was a small-brained human relative practicing sex-specific burial rites hundreds of thousands of years before we were?
Easter Island Lake Hid a Moai
A crater lake on Easter Island dried up and revealed a finished moai no one had ever seen. It's new to researchers and the island's own elders.
Robin Hood's Oak Succumbs to Foot Traffic and Concrete
It survived the Normans, the Black Death, and two world wars. What killed England's most famous tree may be harder to stomach than any of that.
Seafloor Footprints Point to Earliest Evidence of Sight
You can't fossilize a sense. But 231 trails pressed into ancient seafloor mud turn out to be close enough.
Lucy's Hunter: A Giant Crocodile
A 3-million-year-old crocodile named for Lucy, the most famous hominin in archaeology.
Ghost DNA from Lost Humans Still Fights Infections
Three separate encounters with an extinct human species left thousands of inherited variants still tuning immune systems across the Pacific. What did our ancestors bring back?
Three Tiny Teeth Exposed a Missing Branch of Marsupial Evolution
Fossils from Queensland suggest a lineage of marsupials that spent millions of years doing their own thing, unrelated to anything scientists thought they knew.
Deep Sea Whale Necropolis Is Five Million Years Old
Nearly 500 whale fossils, a new species named after the trench, and bone-eating worms thriving 7 kilometers down. What else has been accumulating in the dark?