Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin left home and moved to Philadelphia at age 17. His adoptive hometown still bears numerous traces of his extraordinary legacy, from the University of Pennsylvania to America’s first lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. One of the city’s most central and successful public figures from a very young age, Franklin cofounded the Union Fire Company, an all-volunteer brigade, in 1736.

“When Franklin starts the volunteer fire department in 1736, he’s sort of an up-and-coming guy,” said Libby O’Connell, HISTORY’s chief historian. “He’s working his way up the rungs of civil and professional life. By founding the volunteer fire department in Philadelphia, he’s setting himself up as a civic leader.” He was likely inspired by America’s first professional fire department, established in his native Boston in the 17th century, O’Connell explained.

Document thought to be a 1736 list of members of the Union Fire Company. (Credit: Tom Lingenfelter)

Active until 1820, the Union Fire Company motivated other groups of people across Philadelphia to open their own volunteer brigades, O’Connell said. These types of associations, formed by individuals who chose to help each other for the good of society, would eventually set the stage for professional organizations and raise standards of living across America. The same spirit can still be seen in volunteer fire departments today, she noted.

Lingenfelter came across the list of Union Fire Company members while sifting through his enormous collection of historical manuscripts. “It got my attention when I saw Ben Franklin’s name on the list,” Lingenfelter said. “It was in a pack of old business papers, and I don’t remember where I got it.” He said the papers seem to have belonged to Union Fire Company cofounder Joseph Paschall, a prominent merchant and member of Philadelphia’s Common Council. Paschall, whose name appears first on the roster, served as the fire brigade’s clerk.

Roughly 10 inches long and 4 inches wide, the paper features the names of 26 men, scrawled in ink under the heading “The List of the Names of the Union Fire Company.” Each name is marked with Xs in pencil and pen, an indication that the list might have functioned as an attendance sheet.

By comparing the collection of names to the Union Fire Company’s book of minutes, Lingenfelter concluded that the document dates to 1736, the year of the department’s founding. He said that the group’s rules, also recorded in the minutes, offer a potential reason for the list’s existence: Each member was required to keep two copies of the roster. This particular copy likely belonged to Paschall and appears to be in his handwriting, Lingenfelter said.

Lingenfelter said he has no immediate plans for the document, which has yet to be analyzed and authenticated. And while it may not provide new information about the Union Fire Company, it serves as a reminder of Benjamin Franklin’s numerous accomplishments and a fascinating project that typified his notion of civic responsibility. “His record on that type of public service was unbeatable,” said O’Connell.

(Credit: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

2. February 5, 1958: Savannah River, Georgia
When a B-47 carrying a nuclear device experienced a midair collision with an F-86 aircraft during a training simulation in February 1958, officials decided to jettison the bomb into the Savannah River. Fortunately, the device’s conventional explosives didn’t detonate when the weapon slid into the water and, as is standard with the nuclear version of a “live fire” exercise, the nuclear capsule wasn’t installed in the weapon. The Air Force searched until mid-April but never located the bomb. Today residents refer to this broken arrow as the Tybee Bomb.

3. March 11, 1958: Florence, South Carolina
In March 1958, as a team of military divers scoured the Savannah River in Georgia for a broken arrow, another one fell in the southeast quadrant of the United States. A B-47E aircraft carrying a thermonuclear weapon took off from South Carolina for an overseas base, accidentally jettisoning it shortly thereafter. The conventional explosives detonated on impact with the ground in a suburban Florence neighborhood, demolishing a house and causing several injuries.

4. November 4, 1958: Dyess Air Force Base, Texas
When a B-47 carrying a nuclear warhead catches fire on takeoff, it’s a problem. That’s what happened when a B-47 left Texas’ Dyess Air Force Base in November 1958 to transport a thermonuclear device to another location. At 1,500 feet it began experiencing trouble. Three of the plane’s crew members ejected safely, but one was killed when the plane subsequently crashed, setting off the bomb’s conventional explosives and blasting a crater 35 feet in diameter and 6 feet deep. All the nuclear components were recovered at the scene.

5. January 24, 1961: Goldsboro, North Carolina
In one of the closest calls in accidental nuclear detonation history, a single safety switch prevented a 20-megaton Mk39 hydrogen bomb from exploding in North Carolina in January 1961. When a B-52 carrying two of the bombs suffered a fuel leak in the wing, the plane exploded and dropped both bombs earthward. The parachute of one bomb deployed, but the other weapon nearly detonated when five of its six safety devices failed and it broke apart upon impact with the ground. While the Air Force recovered the bomb’s plutonium, the thermonuclear stage containing uranium was never found. The Air Force subsequently purchased and fenced off a land easement in the area where officials believe the uranium lies.

7. January 17, 1966: Palomares, Spain
It’s pretty hard to cover up the midair explosion of a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs when the event is witnessed by hundreds of onlookers. So it came as no surprise to anyone when the Palomares incident, as it has come to be known, hit the front page of the New York Times in January 1966, just three days after the event occurred. During a routine refueling operation over Spain, an American B-52 patrolling on airborne alert was struck by the fuel plane’s boom, which instantly destroyed both planes and killed seven of the 11 total crew members. Two of the B-52′s bombs exploded on impact with the ground near the village of Palomares, contaminating approximately 1 square mile with radioactive plutonium. Another bomb was found unexploded in a riverbed, while the fourth weapon fell into the Mediterranean Sea. That broken arrow was sighted by a local fisherman, who promptly went to court to claim salvage rights. Under prevailing maritime law, the salvage rights would have conferred 1 percent of the device’s $2 billion value—or about $20 million—on the fisherman. The Air Force reportedly settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

8. January 21, 1968: Thule Air Force Base, Greenland
When a fire broke out in the navigator’s compartment of a B-52 flying on alert near the Article Circle in January 1968, the plane attempted to land at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. It crashed about seven miles short of the runway and burst into flames, causing one bomb to detonate, one to burn and two others to sink through the ice sheet into the bay. The accident spread radioactive contamination from the plutonium core across a 1,000-foot area around the crash. Nearly a quarter of a million cubic feet of contaminated ice, snow, water and crash debris were removed to a storage site in the United States over the course of four months. Of the two weapons that went through the ice sheet, one was finally recovered in 1979, but an as-yet-unrecovered broken arrow still lies on the floor of Baffin Bay.

9. September 19, 1980: Damascus, Arkansas
When an Air Force repairman in Damascus, Arkansas, dropped his wrench into a Titan II ICBM missile silo during a routine maintenance operation in September 1980, his fumble spelled disaster. The heavy wrench punctured the pressurized fuel tank of the missile, which leaked slowly for over eight hours before exploding, killing one service member and injuring 21 others. A nuclear warhead contained in the missile’s reentry vehicle was ejected in the blast but was subsequently recovered intact.

Amelia Earhart speaks to reporters and others in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where she landed her plane after successfully crossing the Atlantic. (Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Earhart had spent the last 15 hours tossed by dangerous storms over the North Atlantic, contending with failing machinery and sipping a can of tomato juice to calm her queasy stomach. That day—May 21, 1932—she planned to end her journey at Paris’ Le Bourget airfield, where exactly five years earlier Charles Lindbergh had completed the first solo transatlantic flight. When her Vega’s reserve fuel tank sprang a leak and flames began engulfing the exhaust manifold, however, Earhart wound up navigating to a Northern Ireland pasture.

“I was never in Ireland before,” Earhart later told reporters, “but the sight of the thatched cottages and the marvelous green grass and trees left me no doubt that I had actually made the Emerald Isle. I was still surer when I heard the brogue of my friend Dan McCallion.”

Amelia Earhart receives an award for becoming the second person and first woman to complete a solo transatlantic flight. (Credit: New York Times Company/Getty Images)

Thrust into the spotlight as the first woman to soar over the pond, Earhart smarted at the attention, particularly when the press likened her to Lindbergh and dubbed her “Lady Lindy.” She repeatedly emphasized that she’d been a mere passenger on the trip, never even touching the controls, and didn’t deserve any accolades. “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes,” she gloomily reminded a journalist. “Maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”

Four years later, as the five-year anniversary of Lindbergh’s feat approached, Earhart had racked up enough training hours to feel ready. Many pilots had vied to become the second person to cross the Atlantic alone, but so far all had failed. One of them, the female aviator Ruth Nichols, was poised to make another attempt, and her plans goaded Earhart to act fast.

When she encountered Dan McCallion 80 years ago, Earhart knew she’d made history in her own right. Shortly thereafter, after drinking some water and washing up, the exhausted aviator hitched a ride into town, where she called her husband, George Putnam, and told him rumors of a crash in France had been greatly exaggerated. She then spent the night with the Gallegher family, owners of the farm where her plane still smoldered. The following day reporters materialized and armfuls of congratulatory correspondence began arriving. Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne, deep in mourning after the discovery days earlier of their kidnapped son’s body, sent the first note.

As the world celebrated Earhart’s triumph, some remained less effusive about her slightly abbreviated voyage—including her own sister. “Of course, any landing on land is good,” Muriel Earhart Morissey told The New York Times. “It is much better than if she’d landed in the water. I am sorry she did not get all the way to Paris, but, after all, a landing in Ireland makes the trip a success.”

Marilyn Monroe appears in one of her most iconic portraits several years before singing at President Kennedy’s birthday gala. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Monroe traveled to New York against the wishes of her bosses at 20th Century Fox, who later fired her from the project. “Marilyn had already missed quite a bit of time on the set because of her illnesses,” explained Scott Fortner, a historian of the actress who has one of the world’s largest collections of Marilyn Monroe-owned memorabilia. Though she was eventually re-hired, her untimely death on August 5, 1962, prevented the movie from ever being completed.

Marilyn Monroe sings “Happy Birthday” to Kennedy on May 19, 1962. (Credit: Yale Joel/Life Magazine/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday, Mr. President
Happy birthday to you

Thanks, Mr. President,
For all the things you’ve done,
The battles that you’ve won
The way you deal with U.S. Steel
And our problems by the ton
We thank you so much
Everybody, happy birthday

The dress in which Marilyn Monroe performed at JKF’s birthday, which sold in 1999 for nearly $1.3 million. (Credit: Getty Images)

Monroe’s performance only lasted about a minute. But it caused an immediate sensation, in part because of rumors that she and the present were having an affair. One columnist wrote that the actress seemed to be “making love to the president in direct view of 40 million Americans.” Actress Joan Copeland, who attended the gala, said Monroe sounded breathy because she was anxious and winded from running around backstage. According to Fortner, however, “She knew exactly the way she wanted to sing it. She rehearsed it well in advance. It wasn’t an accident.”

The event turned out to be one of Monroe’s final public appearances—and, JFK biographer Michael O’Brien observed, the last time she saw the president. That August, she died at age 36 of an apparent drug overdose, and the following year Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Yet the aura surrounding them lives on, with Monroe’s dress selling for nearly $1.3 million at a 1999 auction. “You have the greatest sex symbol of her day singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy,” Fortner said. “It was just one of those moments in time that can never be repeated.”

The Olympic flame is lit in Olympia, Greece, on May 10, 2012, before embarking on its journey to Britain. (Credit: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

While the pageantry appeared to reprise a sacred ancient Greek tradition, the Olympic torch relay was actually a piece of modern political theater carefully scripted and paid for entirely by Nazi Germany. The Greeks employed a ritual fire in the ancient Olympics, but they never staged a relay of torchbearers to open their games. The Olympic torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the chief organizer of the Berlin Games, who envisioned an unprecedented succession of more than 3,000 runners transporting the flame from the cradle of the ancient Olympics to Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where it would light the cauldron during the opening ceremonies of the XI Olympiad.

Diem had been instrumental in getting the International Olympic Committee to award the Summer Games to Berlin in 1931, but their future was very much in doubt when Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933. Hitler was contemptuous of the modern Olympic movement, which he once dismissed as “an invention of Jews and Freemasons,” but propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels convinced the Führer that the Summer Games would be an international stage for showcasing Nazi Germany—and the torch relay would be its stirring opening act. Hitler admired the ancient Greeks and saw the Nazis as their rightful heirs. While Diem was not a member of the Nazi Party, his torch relay would be coopted by the Nazis as a powerful propaganda tool to bind not only the ancient and modern Olympics, but ancient Greece and the Third Reich as well.

The entire torch relay, starting with the ceremony in Olympia, was a thoroughly German production. Krupp, a German arms manufacturer, crafted the steel-clad torches that featured a magnesium-burning element designed by German chemists to stay lit regardless of weather conditions. Germany’s Zeiss Optics built the mirror used to light the flame, and an Opel car carrying a spare Olympic flame trailed the torchbearers. Goebbels ensured there was extensive German media coverage of the relay, including radio reports directly from the route, and he commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to film it as part of “Olympia,” the Nazi propaganda film released in 1938. Surrounded by the mythology of ancient Greece, Riefenstahl wasn’t above doing some mythmaking of her own. Dissatisfied with the footage of the actual lighting ceremony in Olympia and believing that Kondylis did not resemble the ideal of an Olympic torchbearer from antiquity—had such a thing existed—the director brought another relay runner to Berlin after the Summer Games to stage the version of the torch lighting that appears in the movie.

The Olympic torch relay passes by the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on July 31, 1936, en route to the Olympic Stadium. (Credit: NARA)

The Olympic flame was welcomed by 50,000 Germans at the Czech border on the morning of July 31, 1936, and the following day German runner Fritz Schilgen held the torch aloft as he entered Berlin’s Olympic Stadium before a sea of 100,000 onlookers. Schilgen, an elite runner but an Olympian, was chosen as the final torchbearer for his youthful Aryan appearance and graceful gait. As he ran the ultimate leg of the relay past Hitler’s box before lighting the cauldron, he completed the last link in a chain binding the Third Reich to Mount Olympus.

Less than two years later, Hitler annexed Austria, and Vienna’s Nazis greeted the Führer with the same enthusiastic welcome they had given the Olympic flame. Soon after, Germans, arms raised high in Nazi salutes rather than in gestures of goodwill, carried Krupp machine guns instead of Krupp torches along the same pathways beaten by the relay runners as they occupied eastern Europe. Due to World War II, the Summer Games were not held again until the 1948 London Olympics. Despite the torch relay’s creation by their recent enemy, British organizers embraced the ritual. A “relay of peace” was run through wartorn Europe, and once again it began in ancient Olympia. As a symbol of peace, Greek corporal Konstantinos Dimitrelis, the first torchbearer, laid down his arms and removed his army uniform before grasping the blazing staff.

Scientist Judyth Sassoon with a pliosaur skull that shows signs of arthritis. (Credit: Simon Powell, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol)

Nimble swimmers with crushing bites and bodies built for speed, pliosaurs dominated the oceans of the Jurassic and Cretaceous. The largest known specimen, unearthed in Norway in 2008, measured 50 feet in length and boasted teeth the size of cucumbers. The newly described skull, found by a local fossil collector in southwest England in 1994, is roughly 7 feet long, meaning the original animal stretched 30 feet, said Judyth Sassoon, a University of Bristol scientist who led the project and co-wrote the paper. It remained in the collection of the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery following its discovery.

“When I saw it for the first time three years ago, I was instantly fascinated by some of the unusual markings on the lower and upper jaws,” Sassoon recalled. “At the time the fossil still needed to be extracted from the clay matrix in which it was discovered, and the museum staff kindly helped with that daunting task. Once the fossil was cleaned up, this pliosaur’s unique life story started to make sense.”

Tentatively identified as female, the pliosaur lived to a ripe old, as evidenced by its large size and fused skull bones, Sassoon and her colleagues determined. But the carnivore seems to have spent its golden years grappling with progressive arthrosis, a degenerative disease of the joints. “There is evidence of erosion in the jaw joints, probably the result of wear and tear on the cartilage,” Sassoon explained. “The disease led to a misalignment of jaws, the lower jaw being deviated to one side. This is clearly indicated by tooth marks from the upper jaw impinging on the bone of the lower jaw and, similarly, a tooth from the lower jaw causing an infection in the tooth socket of the upper jaw.”

A pliosaur (bottom) compared to a great white shark (top), a killer whale and a human. (Credit: School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol)

Strictly speaking, pliosaurs weren’t dinosaurs, but the predators shared certain characteristics with their contemporaries back on shore. “Reptiles are a group of related animals, so diseases in one branch of the reptile family could easily reflect diseases in another,” said Sassoon. “It is highly probable that Mesozoic reptiles—dinosaurs, crocodiles, marine reptiles, et cetera—were susceptible to many diseases that we know very little about, since disease symptoms are so rarely preserved in the fossil record.”

Sassoon pointed out that dinosaurs and giant marine reptiles, just like humans today, occupied the upper levels of their respective food chains. Free from predators, individuals could thus grow old enough to develop conditions like arthritis. “This work does suggest that as individual top-predator reptiles aged they, like humans, suffered from age-associated diseases,” Sassoon said. “When the disease developed too far, preventing an individual animal from feeding, it would lead to its demise.”

A figure painted in red and back appears on a rock that was once part of France’s Abri Castanet rock shelter. (Credit: Raphaëlle Bourrillon)

Known as Abri Castanet, the collapsed shelter in the Dordogne region was once home to a group of reindeer hunters who left behind thousands of artifacts. “Abri Castanet has long been recognized as one of the oldest sites in Eurasia with evidence for human symbolism in the form of hundreds of personal ornaments,” said New York University anthropology professor Randall White, one of the study’s coauthors. Examples include pierced animal teeth, pierced shells and beads, he said.

An engraved ring-like symbol from Abri Castanet. (Credit: Raphaëlle Bourrillon)

With paintings up to 32,000 years old, Chauvet boasts a vivid menagerie of animals so deftly rendered that they defy our incorrect assumptions about cavemen’s limited intellectual capacities. The older art at Abri Castanet, by contrast, consists of simple rings and abstract forms thought to represent female genitalia. “This art appears to be slightly older than the famous paintings from the Grotte Chauvet in southeast France but of a very different tradition,” White explained. “While there are animal figures, the dominant motif is considered to represent abstract female vulvas, although this interpretation has been contested and discussed for more than a century.”

Unlike the Chauvet paintings, located deep in uninhabited reaches of the cave, the Abri Castanet wall art festooned central living areas where people once ate and produced tools. “The engravings and paintings at Castanet are now shown to be directly associated with everyday life,” said White. “In other words, the art at Castanet seems to be a quotidian art.”

White said that the dating of the Abri Castanet wall art “raises anew the question of the evolutionary and adaptive significance of graphic representation and its role in the successful dispersal of modern human populations out of Africa into Western Eurasia and beyond.” It may also be part of an important artistic legacy: Just 6 miles away lies the astonishing Lascaux cave complex, where people—the descendants, perhaps, of Abri Castanet’s artists—masterfully painted animals, human figures and abstract symbols 17,000 years ago.

Spencer Perceval, whose murder remains the only assassination of a British prime minister in history. (Credit: National Portrait Gallery)

The Liverpool businessman had been arrested in Russia on charges of insurance fraud in 1804, and he spent more than five years festering in rat-infested jails, surviving at times on just bread and water. The British ambassador and the foreign office ignored Bellingham’s repeated pleas to intercede on his behalf. Russian authorities eventually dropped the charges, likely trumped up, and Bellingham returned to his family in England bankrupt and broken. He lobbied the British government for financial compensation for his suffering and the loss of his business, but when his letters went unanswered, Bellingham traveled to London in January 1812 to personally press his case. For weeks the merchant was a regular presence inside the Houses of Parliament, but his direct appeals to government officials fell on deaf ears.

Now, as Bellingham sat in the House of Commons, venom coursed through his veins. He was so consumed by the belief that the British government had denied him justice that he focused his rage on the man in charge of that government. Around 5:15 p.m. Bellingham saw the target of his wrath, Tory Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, cross the threshold into the lobby. Without saying a word, he strode purposefully toward the diminutive prime minister, pulled one of the two dueling pistols he concealed in a specially tailored pocket beneath his overcoat and pumped a shot directly into the chest of the leader of the world’s most powerful country. The large lead ball fired from the gun instantly pierced the prime minister’s heart. Perceval put his hand to his chest and, according to eyewitness accounts, gasped “I am murdered!” or “Murder, Murder!” before falling to the ground. The politician’s blood flowed through the hallowed halls of Parliament as he was carried to a nearby room. Perceval, his white waistcoat scarlet and his crimson cheeks pale, was propped up in a sitting position on a table. Minutes later, a surgeon arrived and put his fingers on Perceval’s wrist. Nothing. The prime minister was dead.

Illustration of the assassination of Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham. (Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The assassin believed that Britons would applaud his strike in the name of justice, and the reception he received while being escorted out of Parliament in handcuffs hours after the assassination was a shocking affirmation. The large crowd that had swelled outside Parliament cheered lustily upon seeing Bellingham, and the mob even tried to abet the shooter’s escape by throwing open the doors of the hackney coach that was to transfer him to Newgate Prison. Sir Samuel Romilly, a member of Parliament, recounted in his memoir that “the most savage expressions of joy and exultation were heard, accompanied with regret that others, and particularly the attorney-general, had not shared the same fate.” In Wolverhampton, the news of the prime minister’s murder was greeted with celebratory gunfire, while in Nottingham bells pealed, bonfires blazed and crowds beat drums.

The lack of collective mourning testified to just how divisive a figure Perceval had been in Britain since becoming prime minister in 1809. During his tumultuous time in office, he zealously pursued war against Napoleon, and his continuation of efforts to impede American trade with France would soon help to ignite the War of 1812. The high taxes imposed by Perceval to fund the military ventures strained an economy already crippled by French naval blockades. Driven by his religious convictions, Perceval also strangled the illegal slave trade that had been an economic lifeline to port cities such as Bellingham’s hometown of Liverpool. Amid the social tumult of the Industrial Revolution, the prime minister cracked down hard on Luddite rioters, and his government passed controversial legislation making destruction of machines a capital offense.

While many with deep animosity toward Perceval celebrated his demise, justice for Bellingham was swift. Just four days after the assassination, he stood trial in London’s historic courthouse, the Old Bailey. When Bellingham had a chance to address the court, he recounted his experiences in Russia and said that his action, while necessary and justified, did not spring from any personal malice toward the prime minister. “The unfortunate lot had fallen upon him as the leading member of that administration which had repeatedly refused me any reparation,” Bellingham told the packed courtroom. Then he chillingly added, “I trust this fatal catastrophe will be warning to other ministers. If they had listened to my case, this court would not have been engaged in this case.”

The jury, though, was hardly sympathetic to Bellingham, and it took less than 15 minutes to render its verdict: guilty. Bellingham was once again thrown in a prison cell, where he subsisted on nothing but bread and water. This time, however, it wouldn’t be a long stay. On May 18, 1812, just a week after the sensational murder, Bellingham hanged from the gallows. Robert Banks Jenkinson, earl of Liverpool, soon became prime minister, and the stability of his 15-year rule stood in contrast to the rocky tenure of his predecessor. Perceval faded into obscurity, and while he ranks high among Britain’s forgotten prime ministers, he may always be remembered for his violent end.

• Structure Excavated at Xultún

   

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  In 2010, a room featuring murals was discovered at the Maya archaeological site of Xultún, located in Guatemala’s Petén rainforest. Researchers believe it served as the studio of a scribe or calendar priest some 1,200 years ago. (Credit: Tyrone Turner/National Geographic)

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• Panoramic View of Murals

   

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  Only 56 square feet in size, the room is decorated with murals dating back to roughly 800 A.D. on each of its three intact walls. They feature a scribe, a king and three identical figures painted in black. (Credit: Tyrone Turner/National Geographic)

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• Excavation of Structure

   

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  Archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, coauthor of a new paper on the discovery, excavates the north wall of the Xultún structure. It features the painting of a kneeling man holding a stylus, thought to represent a scribe. (Credit: Tyrone Turner/National Geographic)

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• Calendar Calculations

   

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  Numbers scrawled on the walls of the structure are thought to represent computations of lunar cycles. One calculation records an interval of 17 baktuns (144,000-day periods), debunking the theory that the Maya calendar ends after 13 baktuns. Some have used this incorrect interpretation to suggest that the world will end on December 21, 2012. (Credit: William Saturno and David Stuart/National Geographic)

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• Painting of Scribe

   

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  An artist’s rendering of the mural thought to depict a scribe. (Credit: Heather Hurst)

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• Painting of King

   

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  An artist’s rendering of the mural thought to depict a king, who wears an elaborate headdress made of blue feathers. (Credit: Heather Hurst)

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• Painting of Three Figures

   

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  An artist’s rendering of the mural depicting three figures in identical costumes. (Credit: Heather Hurst)

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Oddly enough, it was a looters’ trench that two years ago led to one of the most remarkable finds in the recent history of Maya archaeology. In 2010, while participating in an excavation directed by Boston University professor William Saturno, an undergraduate student spied faint traces of pigment on a wall bared by looters. Saturno examined the spot, located just several feet below the surface, but didn’t expect to find anything substantial. “Maya paintings are incredibly rare, not because the Maya didn’t paint them often but because they rarely preserve in the tropical environment of Guatemala,” he explained.

Venturing deeper into what appeared to be a surprisingly intact house, Saturno spotted additional murals more unspoiled than the first. Once he and his team decided the structure warranted a closer look, the race was on to protect it from the oncoming rainy season. The National Geographic Society provided grants for the conservation work as well as further excavations in 2010 and 2011. The resulting discoveries are being reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science.

Figures on the Wall
Only 56 square feet in size, the room is decorated with murals dating back to roughly 800 A.D. on each of its three intact walls. The north wall features a seated king wearing an elaborate headdress with blue feathers, an attendant peeking out from behind the plumes. Painted on a recessed surface, this image could be hidden behind a curtain that hung from a partially preserved bone rod. Kneeling beside the king is a man holding a stylus, possibly to identify him as a scribe, Saturno said. The meaning of an accompanying label, which roughly translates to “Younger Brother Obsidian” or “Junior Obsidian,” remains unclear.

Three male figures painted in black appear on the west well, each sporting identical feathered headdresses and medallions. One of them is labeled “Older Brother Obsidian” or “Senior Obsidian,” a title whose significance has yet to be understood. The east wall of the room features a figure painted in black that has badly eroded due to its proximity to the exterior.

An Astronomer’s Whiteboard
While the paintings are rare and intriguing, another element festooning the north and east walls proved even more astonishing to the researchers. Scrawled in red and black are charts of numbers represented by bars and dots in the typical Maya fashion. After examining the figures, experts realized they denoted time spans corresponding to cycles of the Mayan calendar. “This was a calculator, so to speak, for a calendar priest or a Maya astronomer to calculate moon ages,” said David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, who helped decipher the hieroglyphs.

Until now, Mayan astronomical tables have only been found in books, most famously the 1,000-year-old text known as the Dresden Codex. But the newly discovered examples, which predate the Dresden Codex by at least 200 years, appear on the walls of a dwelling, scribbled alongside artwork. For this reason, the researchers believe the room once served as a workshop for scribes, calendar priests, mathematicians, astronomers or others who would have been observing the heavens. While puzzling over a formula or predicting the next eclipse, they would have conveniently worked out their calculations right on the wall. “It’s kind of like having a whiteboard in your office,” Stuart said.

Debunking the 2012 Myth
In recent years, popular culture has latched on to theories that the Maya predicted an apocalypse on December 21, 2012. That date corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar’s current cycle, which lasts for 13 of the 144,000-day intervals known as baktuns. But scholars have long argued that, while Mayan astronomers saw each cycle’s conclusion as significant, they never foresaw an apocalypse. According to the researchers who studied the Xultún house, the calculations on the walls confirm once again that the Mayan calendar stretches far beyond this December. One notation in particular records an interval of 17 baktuns, a period of time that extends past the alleged doomsday.

Saturno acknowledged that the new discovery might not sway people with absolute confidence in the December 2012 prediction. “I think that as a general rule, if someone is a hardcore believer that the world is going to end in 2012, no painting is going to convince them otherwise,” he said. What may do the trick, however, is waking up on December 22, he added.

One of the perforated skulls recently unearthed in Spain. (Credit: Plataforma SINC)

While physicians believed the operation could alleviate migraines, epilepsy, swelling and other brain disorders, it may have carried cultural rather than medical significance in certain societies. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, for instance, skull drilling and other cranial deformation techniques were ritualistically performed on healthy individuals. In central and eastern Europe, meanwhile, postmortem trepanations may have been part of early burial traditions.

“As of the Bronze Age, cases of trepanation are common throughout Europe, mainly in the Mediterranean Basin,” said Belén López Martínez of the University of Oviedo, coauthor of a new paper on two trepanned skulls exhumed in Spain. “In the Iberian Peninsula there are many cases that have been dated back to the Copper Age some 4,000 years ago.”

By the Middle Ages, however, trepanation had become less widespread than the era’s other gruesome medical interventions. One noteworthy case is that of Henry I, ruler of the Spanish kingdom of Castile. In 1217 a falling roof tile struck the 13-year-old monarch, and doctors trepanned him in an apparent attempt to stem the resulting hemorrhage. Henry died soon after.

In their study, published in the latest issue of Anthropological Science, López Martínez and his colleagues describe two perforated skulls discovered in a cemetery near Soria, a city in north-central Spain. They have been dated between the 13th and 14th centuries, making them rare examples of medieval trepanation. One of the skulls belonged to a man between 50 and 55 years old and featured grooves made by a sharp object. The other, from a woman between 45 and 50, bears evidence of a different trepanation technique involving scraping.

Researchers couldn’t determine whether the male “patient” underwent trepanation while still alive or after death. However, a lack of skull regeneration signs around the hole suggests he couldn’t have lived long after the procedure, López Martínez said. As for the woman, wound scarring indicates she survived for a “relatively long” time post-surgery, he said. The female skull is particularly unique because trepanation in women seems to have occurred relatively infrequently throughout history, according to López Martínez. Out of all trepanned skulls unearthed in Spain to date, only 10 percent belonged to women, he said.

López Martínez said it remains unclear why these two individuals were subjected to brain surgery hundreds of years ago. “This is the big question on trepanation,” he said. “Its practice can be attributed to many reasons: magic/religious reasons such as to free people from demons that could be torturing them; initiations as a way of giving right of passage to adulthood or to turn someone into a warrior; therapeutic reasons to treat tumors, convulsions, epilepsy, migraines, loss of consciousness and behavioral changes; and the treatment of traumatisms like skull fractures.”

Even today, modern surgeons perform craniotomies to treat certain brain injuries, and some fringe groups believe in the value of trepanation as a voluntary therapy. It has been claimed that the operation bestows a feeling of higher consciousness due to increased blood flow to the brain.