Nehaveigur

Category: History

  • Hermits

    Christopher Knight, called the North Pond Hermit, lived in the wilderness of Maine for 27 years. The Lykov family lived in Khakassia in Siberia without contact to the outside world for 40 years. Ishi was the last American native in California to make contact with the Western world in 1911.…

  • Lifelike Portraits from the Roman Empire

    We don’t have lifelike portraits of anyone until at least the Renaissance. Even the best sculptures and paintings from ancient Rome, Greece or China are stylized or idealized. At least that’s what I used to think until I learned of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. They were created…

  • Insider Attacks

    In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by the name of El Mammoun (El Mammun in the English translation by Lewis Galantière). The location seems to be what is now Mauritania. This reminded…

  • Wind, Sand and Stars

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot in the early years of aviation. He flew military and civilian aircraft in the 1920s and 1940s before dying in a crash during a reconnaissance flight over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. He is most famous for his children’s book The Little Prince, which…

  • From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe

    Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that the horns previously thought to originate from unicorns actually came from narwhals. With that name and a research interest in horns I’m sure there’s a…

  • Wrangel Island Mammoths

    For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the time the last ones died, the palace of Minos in Crete was being built. The cause of the extinction of the Wrangel Island mammoths is…

  • Life Without Clocks or Mirrors

    I’ve always been immoderatly clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs everyone sighs about, a glut of clocks and my thin neck twisting to their perfect circles, around and around and around. This is from Wolf…

  • 1933 and 2025

    To the degree it is possible for any one born in the 1980s, I have a sense for what occurred in Germany in the run-up to World War II. In high school in Austria, several years of history classes were about the rise and rule of the Nazis. We read…

  • Greatness Can’t Be Planned

    No plan survives first contact with the enemy Helmuth von Moltke The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything Dwight Eisenhower I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s possible to will greatness into existence.  On the contrary, to a first approximation none of the grand strategies that I have…

  • Rome Was Different

    In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and there are some surprising insights. For example, I didn’t know how much the Romans where sticklers for the rule of law. Unfortunately, her prose is…

  • Shamanism

    There are those who travel spirit worlds. They may know that those worlds only exist in their minds, or they may believe that those worlds are real. They use drugs to enter altered states, sometimes in combination with music. They burn herbs, they paint their bodies, they put on masks,…

  • Tom McGuane’s Cameo

    Some trivia: I’m 80% sure that writer Thomas McGuane makes a cameo appearance in the music video for Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 song Come Monday. 70 seconds into the video, Buffett and his girlfriend pick up a couple of hitchhikers, and the guy looks too much like McGuane to be a…

  • In Patagonia

    Bruce Chatwin’s most well-known work is In Patagonia. It’s a mix of travel writing, history and a fiction. It was first published in 1977. Below are a few paragraphs I highlighted. A hundred years ago, the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their…

  • The Soviet Space Shuttle

    The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was completed and reached orbit in 1988, nine years after the first Space Shuttle. Even though that initial test flight was a success, it never flew…

  • Relax About the Population Collapse

    There’s widespread agreement that a declining population is equivalent to declining fortunes, be it for cities, for countries or for the whole world. That fertility rates are too low to maintain current population levels is indisputable. Europe, East Asia and the Americas (North and South) are all affected. If the…

  • The Smile Brace

    One of my ancestors was a medical doctor who was responsible for accompanying the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his final resting place after his assassination. When he and the coffin crossed the Danube in the middle of the night, a thunderstorm broke loose, with lightning hitting the water…

  • Moana

    My kids don’t care what I’m reading. Sometimes, when they have run out of other things to do, they leaf through my current book, only to toss it aside contemptuously after a few seconds. Kon-Tiki is different. As soon as they saw the photos of the six bearded Scandinavians sailing…

  • Kon-Tiki

    In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl led an expedition to cross the Pacific on a raft built from balsa wood in the style of the ancient Incas. Believe, even if it’s in a weak theory, moves mountains. While building his raft, Heyerdahl was given many good reasons that his expedition would fail.…

  • Amber Inclusions

    Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in 2025, is an interesting experience. Most fossils, somewhere between bone and rock, are too different from the original animal or the plant to fully engage…

  • A Beautiful Epoch

    Movies and musicals are often set during the Belle Epoque, probably because the dresses and houses are so pretty. Even science fiction is sometimes set in a Belle Epoque-like world (Cyberpunk). Returning to Europe this summer and seeing late 19th century buildings everywhere reminded me of how easy on the…

  • Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

    You have to give it the old communists: They knew how to create a good slogan. Some of them are still in use today, and by people far removed from communism. Trust but verify was coined by Lenin. A colleague and I were talking about whether we should ask for…

  • San Franciscos

    Past visions of San Francisco‘s future, collected by Arthur Chandler.

  • Musical Innuendo

    I like old showtunes because they’re joyful and uncomplicated. At least on the surface. After listening to them a few times, I pick up on the double entendre – yet another reason I like them. The 1940s and 1950s were a supposedly innocent time, but judging by theirs songs, that’s…

  • Anthroposophy

    There are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide, and more than 2,000 Waldorf kindergartens. As a kid, I went to one of them and didn’t like it. Later, I went to Austrian public schools and preferred it. My experience isn’t universal: One of my sisters, who had done her whole…

  • Let Us Make You Fat

    Being fat used to be something to aspire to. “It Is No Longer Necessary to Be Thin, Scrawny and Undeveloped.” Here are more ads from the early 20th century.

  • Primitive Technology

    Primitive Technology is a popular YouTube channel about making things from scratch without any modern tools or materials. It’s not just what it’s about that I like, but, to quote Roger Ebert, how it’s about what it’s about. There is no talking. Context is provided in terse subtitles that remind…

  • Under the Banner of Heaven

    In They Call me Trinity, a comedy western starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a group of Mormon pioneers is harassed by a languid, land-grabbing criminal called the Major and an allied band of Mexican bandits. Because their religion does not permit them to fight, the Mormons initially respond to the…

  • We Invented Ourselves

    We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of humankind. Our greatest invention is our humanity. And we are not done inventing ourselves yet. This is Kevin Kelly, writing on the blog of the…

  • Nuclear Nazis

    In The Berlin Project, Gregory Benford, who is deservedly known for writing some of the best hard science fiction around, asks what would’ve happened if the United States had developed a nuclear bomb early enough to use it against the Nazis during World War II. Then there’s the question what would’ve…

  • Coalescence

    Coalescent theory is a population genetics approach to reconstructing the history of populations. This paper by Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin applies an advanced coalescent model to humans to infer our demographic history. We already knew that Neanderthals and non-African modern humans interbred 45,000 to 49,000 years ago,…

  • Shaman

    Nothing remains of the millions of brilliant men and women who lived before we invented writing. A few cave paintings and some carved figurines are the only exception. But what about their music, their science and their worldview? We know next to nothing, and this is likely to remain the…

  • Finite and Infinite Games

    In this little book, James P. Carse argues that evil is the termination of possibilities, or as he calls it, of infinite play. Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the…

  • The Lion-man Toy

    The Löwenmensch (German for lion-person) is a figurine of a man with a lion’s head, carved from a mammoth’s tusk at least 35,000 years ago. Most interpretations assume that it was carved for ritualistic and shamanic purposes, but I think it may simply have been a toy. It’d have taken…

  • Neanderthal News

    Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:

  • The Venus of Monruz

    This figurine looks like it was created in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s abstract and only hints at a human form. In fact, it was created 11,000 years ago.

  • The Best of Billions

    Why is paleolithic cave art so good? The artistic standard of the painting in Chauvet, created 35,000 years ago, is outstanding. My preferred explanation is that the paintings were created by unusually gifted artists, equivalent in their talent to the very best contemporary painter. Assuming that modern humans appeared 190,000…

  • Chauvet Virtual Tour

    The French National Museum of Archeology has a good virtual tour of the Chauvet cave here. They also have a good gallery of the cave’s art here. Don Hitchcock’s frequently updated website is another great starting point for exploring paleolithic art. Related posts:

  • Avoiding the Paleolithic

    Why are there no movies, TV series or even novels set in the paleolithic? After all, it’s the epoch that made us who we are, and genetically we haven’t changed much in the 11,700 years since. Some of us eat a “paleo diet” with the kinds of food we think…

  • Autogenic Training

    Autogenic training is a relaxation technique similar to mindfulness meditation. I’ve tried both, and I prefer autogenic training. How does it work? You lie down comfortably and close your eyes. You then, in your mind, go through different body parts. You start with your arms and tell yourself, “My arms…

  • Do Composers Die Young?

    When Mozart was my age, he was dead for five years already. He had gone from composing to decomposing. He wasn’t the only composer to die young. Chopin died at 39, Gershwin at 38, Felix Mendelssohn at 38. This made me wonder if there’s a pattern. Are composers splendid torches…

  • The Coffee Ban

    Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time there is ingår påtår?, which means, are refills included? It’s important to know if the café you’re considering is going to give you free coffee…

  • Questions about Cave Art

  • Portrait of a Mammoth

  • Storms of Steel

    This is a World War I memoir by German soldier Ernst Jünger. It describes his experiences fighting in one battle after the next while seeing almost all of his comrades die. I’ve never read anything more vivid about the horrors of war. What makes Storms of Steel particularly effective is…

  • Reality-Memory-History

    An attempt at visual expression. Perception-Memory-History would’ve been a better title.

  • May You Live in Interesting Times

    The phrase “may you live in interesting times” is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue “may you come to the attention of those in authority” and finish with “may the gods give you everything you ask for.” I have no idea about its authenticity. Terry Pratchett…

  • The Jewess of Toledo

    Lion Feuchtwanger published this historical novel in 1955. It’s set in Spain during the second half of the 12th century, which is the golden age of the Middle Ages. It’s the time of Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, both of which make appearances in Feuchtwanger’s novel. Back in Spain,…

  • 1492

    If you had to pick one year that changed Spain, it’d have to be 1492. The year started with the Fall of Granada. On January 2, the last Emir of Granada surrendered to the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile, establishing Christian rule over the entire Iberic Peninsula…

  • Phantom Time and World Ice

    Of the many, many conspiracy theories out there, here are two less known ones that I quite enjoy for their entertainment value: In 1991, Heribert Illig proposed that the years 614-911 AD didn’t happen. They are fake, made up. Charlemagne never existed, and all historical documents from those years are…

  • Smut in Arabian Nights

    The English translation of 1001 Nights by Richard Burton from 1888 is explicit for its time, and it seems that Burton made the translation even spicier than the original. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite. The Medinah girl put her…

  • Arsenic for Longevity

    In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging drug. This is a translation by Copilot, with some editing for readability: On one of the trips I took as I student, I stopped at…

  • Alien Artifacts

    As a kid, before I knew better, I liked to read Erich von Däniken. In Chariots of the Gods, he explained that the pyramids were built by aliens and that evidence of extraterrestrial development aid is evident in the artifacts of other ancient civilizations too. More recently, additional outlets such…

  • Against Epigenetics

    In the 1960s, biologist James McConnell conditioned worms to respond to light flashes, then ground them up and fed them to other worms. He reported that those cannibalistic worms learned to respond to flashes faster than non-cannibalistic control worms, suggesting that memory transfer had taken place. Others couldn’t fully replicate…

  • Arabian Nights

    Here are some beautiful illustrations by Franz Xaver Simm from an old (likely late 1800s) German edition of 1001 Nights:

  • Project Habakkuk

    In his memoir I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier, Max Perutz describes his work on a secret project during World War II to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. Project Habakkuk relied on strengthening the ice by adding sawdust, which increased its strength, as well as an on-board…

  • Involuntary Explorers

    I don’t find Jungian archetypes compelling, but if I did, I’d be drawn to the archetype of the Involuntary Explorer: Men who, due to events beyond their control, stranded in faraway lands, having adventures. A big part of the appeal is that the adventures are involuntary, which removes the suspicion…

  • Apollo

    We have concrete plans to return to the moon. Artemis 2 is a crewed mission scheduled for a lunar flyby in September 2025, and one or two years after that Artemis 3 will perform the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. One of the most remarkable things…

  • Look, and Despair!

    I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read…

  • Ishi in Two Worlds

    Since moving to California, Lassen National Park in Northern California has become one of my favorite places. It’s less well known than Yosemite and the other national parks in driving distance of San Francisco, and therefore less crowded. On the contrary, it sometimes seems deserted, which is astounding considering the…

  • Brutal Journey

    The Narváez expedition departed Spain in 1527 to explore Florida. Things went wrong and only four out of 600 men made it back to Europe after trekking through what today is Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico for eight years, much of it while being enslaved by Indian tribes. Paul Schneider’s…

  • Lola Montez

    In 1846, the Donner Party, a group of 87 men, women and children migrating to California, got surprised by a snowstorm while crossing a Sierra Nevada mountain pass. They had to stop and spend the winter in tents. 39 of them starved or froze to death and some were eaten by…

  • Ads from 1909

    Here are some ads from the March 1909 edition of Sunset Magazine. This poor fellow doesn’t get attention from the ladies because they prefer to listen to the gramophone instead of his awkward attempts at conversation. Bay Area cities used to beg people to move there. This was before the…

  • Tim’s Vermeer

    This is how I want to spend my retirement: Work on projects of my choosing, without having to consider financial constraints or whether others approve. Tim Jenison has the same attitude in the 2013 documentary Tim’s Vermeer. In this case, the project is the reproduction of a 17th century painting…

  • On Two Planets

    On Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz (or Laßwitz) may be the first science fiction novel to imagine an alien invasion. Published in 1897, it’s about Martians travelling to Earth aboard sophisticated spaceships to study humanity. They have superior technology and a more enlightened culture than Earth, but even so, they…

  • The Fire That Never Goes Out

    An essay by Richard Fisher on the Zoroastrian flame that has been kept alive for more than 1,500 years. More on the Long Now foundation here.

  • Sauerkraut Westerns

    You have probably come across spaghetti Westerns: Movies set in the Old West but made by Italians, starring Italians or filmed in Italy. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood is a famous example, but my favorite is They Call Me Trinity starring Bud Spencer and Terence…

  • The First Motorized Transport Casualty

    William Huskisson has earned his place in history by being the first to be killed by a motor vehicle. In 1830, he was crushed by Robert Stephenson’s locomotive Rocket during the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway. He couldn’t get out of the way of locomotive running at 30 mph in…

  • Sini

    Years ago, I went to the British Museum and looked at their collection of calligraphy. I still remember a handful of inscriptions and scrolls combining the Arabic and Chinese calligraphic traditions, which sounds like it wouldn’t work but actually is elegant and subtle. This style is known a Sini and…

  • Crosses in Classrooms

    When I was going to public school in Austria in the 1990s, there was a cross in every classroom. Where I went to elementary school in rural Lower Austria, everyone and their parents were from the same region. It was assumed you were Roman Catholic. The local priest came in…

  • The Long Now

    Before I traveled from Cambridge to San Francisco for the first time to do research on mutant yeast, a friend said: “While you’re there, you should check out the Long Now Foundation”. This was in 2008. Once I had settled into my lab at the brand new UCSF Mission Bay…

  • Ten Thousand Years From Now

    Brother, that breathe the August air Ten thousand years from now, And smell – if still your orchards bear Tart apples on the bough – The early windfall under the tree, And see the red fruit shine, I cannot think your thoughts will be Much different from mine. Should at…

  • Long Generations

    In 2018, I met a man in the dining hall of the hotel in Belden who told me that during the Great Depression he had come to California from Canada riding an old truck with his brothers. His parents had stayed behind. For him to actually have been a Canadian…

  • Early Sounds

    The earliest record of a human voice dates from 1860. Recordings of Bismarck and others from around 1890 are here. The first composition that includes musical notation dates from approximately 150 BC.

  • Paradise Now

    Is the way we organize our society – capitalism, the nation state, individualism – the only way to set up a modern society, or could there be others? Paradise Now by Chris Jennings describes some high-profile examples of 19th century experimentation with alternative ways of living together, including the Shakers,…

  • Political Assassinations

    The last time anyone came close to killing a U.S. president was in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was shot and severely wounded by a mentally ill man. He recovered following surgery and a twelve-day hospital stay. Before then, there were five attempts to kill a president, four of which were…

  • Solzhenitsyn’s Letter

    On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 letter to the Soviet leadership. Maybe Solzhenitsyn’s and Putin’s view of the world are not so incompatible.

  • The Brotherhood of Mt Shasta

    As you hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, for many days you catch glimpses of Mt Shasta between the trees. As you drive through the empty plains of Northern California, it beckons on the horizon. As you take a flight into San Francisco crossing the Sierra Nevada,…

  • The River: Power

    The mansion was built with the money the factory made my ancestors, and the factory was next to the river because it couldn’t have been anywhere else. During the mid-19th century, the cheapest way to generate power to run large machines was to house them next to a river, and…

  • The River: Turks

    For hundreds of years, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires waged war, a conflict that had its roots in the Crusades. The Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683. During the second siege, the Ottomans pillaged the Austrian countryside and terrorized the population, who to them, accustomed to the…

  • Did You Do Your Best?

    Responsibility is a unique concept… You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you… If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can…

  • The Man Who Almost Discovered America

    Scientists go out there and discover things about how the world works. I’m a scientist and sometimes I discover stuff before breakfast. I’m like Christopher Columbus. I don’t make that comparison lightly. Columbus thought he had discovered a new continent, but it turns out that there were already millions of…

  • Tribe

    When a society is under attack, what happens to its mental health? You may think that the associated stress will cause psychiatric disorders to increase, and you’d be wrong. When the Nazis bombed London during World War II, they hoped to produce mass hysteria. Not only did they fail, but…