12758. History Facts

Vikings used rancid butter to style and dress their hair.

12759. History Facts

In Palestine 8–9,000 years ago, a dead relative was buried under the floor of the family's house – except the head. The flesh and brain were removed from the head and the skull used as the base for a plaster mould of the person's head, which was decorated and kept.

12760. History Facts

After a massacre carried out by Indian soldiers in 1857, the British soldiers made the Indians clean up the blood – and those who refused had to lick it up.

12761. History Facts

Slaves sometimes had to fight to the death in a Roman arena.To make sure they weren't just pretending to be dead, they could be prodded with a red-hot poker and hit on the head with a huge hammer.

12762. History Facts

The Greeks played the game knucklebones with real bones from the knuckles of animals that have cloven feet – like pigs, goats and antelopes.

12763. History Facts

Theban king Mithradites (132–63 BCE) took small doses of poison regularly to develop immunity and protect himself from poisoners. When he later wanted to kill himself, the poison he took did not kill him.

12764. History Facts

Wig-makers suffered during times of plague as people thought the disease could be caught from wigs made of human hair. So many second-hand wigs were infested with fleas that they were probably right!

12765. History Facts

Inuit people used to make trousers out of the gullet – wind-pipe – of a seal or walrus, using one for each leg.

12766. History Facts

In Sparta, Greece, in 600 BCE the law required that a child born imperfect – disabled or deformed – be killed immediately.

12767. History Facts

Birching was allowed as a punishment in Britain until the 1940s. It consisted of being beaten on the bare buttocks with a bunch of twigs.

12768. History Facts

Toad-eaters were people employed by men selling medicine at fairs and markets.The toad-eater had to swallow a toad – supposed to be deadly poisonous – and then take the medicine.Their survival encouraged people to buy the medicine.They may or may not have actually swallowed the toads…

12769. History Facts

In Ancient Egypt, women kept a cone of grease on their head. During the day, it melted in the hot sun and dripped down, making their hair gleam with grease.

12770. History Facts

Victorian child chimney sweeps sometimes had to crawl through chimneys as narrow as 18 centimetres (7 inches). If they didn't go quickly enough, their bare feet were pricked with burning straws.

12771. History Facts

Mary Stuart, queen of England from 1553 to 1558, had 274 people burned at the stake just for being Protestant Christians.

12772. History Facts

In 1856, the USA passed a law saying that its citizens could claim any uninhabited island anywhere in the world if it contained large deposits of bird faeces.

12773. History Facts

In the 1990s, fashionable women in Europe who wanted to look thin wore corsets laced so tightly that their ribs were sometimes broken!

12774. History Facts

In the nineteenth century, a school headmaster in York, England, massacred his pupils and hid their bodies in cupboards.

12775. History Facts

During the Great Plague that struck England in 1665–66, boys at Eton school were punished for not smoking – smoking was thought to protect them from the disease.

12776. History Facts

Before written or computerized records helped us to keep track of criminals, many countries marked criminals with a tattoo or a branding iron – a red hot iron used to burn a pattern, letter or picture into their skin.This meant that everyone could see what they had done.

12777. History Facts

Bird faeces called guano were collected and sold from Peru, Chile and Bolivia for hundreds of years. It was used as a fertilizer for plants.

Fact
The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.      .. More >>