A Brief History On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson announced the discovery of the prehistoric missing link between ape and man! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Dawson, an amateur archaeologist presenting fossilized skull pieces to the Geological Society of London, claiming they were found in a quarry near Piltdown, East Sussex. The scientific community accepted the skull and jaw bones as genuine and declared a new species of ape-man, naming it Eoanthropus dawsoni. This creature was touted as the “missing link” between ape and man. As usual with new scientific discoveries, critics did not accept the discovery and conclusions as…
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A Brief History In August of 1819, the Nantucket whaling ship, Essex, set sail on a two and a half year whaling voyage that on November 20, 1820 turned into eternity! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the Essex became a real life Pequod and it found the real life Moby Dick! The Essex was 87 feet long, displaced 238 tons and was equipped with 4 whale boats, 28 foot boats that pursued whales and from which the harpoons were thrown. (A spare boat was kept beneath the deck.) A whale would be killed and towed back to the ship…
A Brief History On November 9, 1913, The Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the North American lakes, destroyed 19 ships and killed more than 250 people. Digging Deeper Generally, speaking when we think of cyclonic storms to cause catastrophic damage in North America, we think of hurricanes. Nevertheless, today marks the 100-year anniversary of an extratropical cyclone, i.e. a cyclonic storm that did not originate in the ocean, but rather from the convergence of two major storm fronts. Making matter worse, the Great Lakes’ warm waters helped fuel the storm to such…
A Brief History On November 5, 1530, The St. Felix’s Flood destroyed the city of Reimerswaal in the Netherlands and killed over 100,000 people, making it the fifth deadliest flood in human history. Digging Deeper Over the past month, we have seen one city destroyed by a tornado, another by an earthquake, and another by an army. For our fourth city to experience near total devastation, we go back to mother nature. The now lost city of Reimerswaal in the Netherlands is our victim this time around. Reimerswaal was granted city rights in 1374 during the reign of Holy Roman…
A Brief History On November 4, 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter found the entrance to Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Digging Deeper The boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun reigned ca. 1332 to 1323 B.C., his name meaning that he is the living image of the god Amun. “Tut” was likely the son of the rather unique pharaoh Akhenaten, the husband to Nefertiti, who herself ranks seventh on a list of Top 10 African Rulers, Kings and Emperors. Tut’s father’s uniqueness stems from attempting something of a religious revolution. Tut’s father tried to focus worship on the sun disk…