The Human World
- The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth.
- When Albert Einstein died, his final words died with him. The nurse at his side didn’t understand German.
- St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was not Irish.
- Many sailors used to wear gold earrings so that they could afford a proper burial when they died.
- The Amayra guides of Bolivia are said to be able to keep pace with a trotting horse for a distance of 100 kilometres.
- The magic word “Abracadabra” was originally intended for the specific purpose of curing hay fever.
- Native American Indians used to name their children after the first thing they saw as they left their tepees subsequent to the birth. Hence such strange names as Sitting Bull and Running Water.
- At the age of 12, Martin Luther King became so depressed he tried committing suicide twice, by jumping out of his bedroom window.
- It is illegal to be a prostitute in Siena, Italy, if your name is Mary.
- Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with the occult and the supernatural.
- The women of an African tribe make themselves more attractive by permanently scaring their faces.
- The childrens’ nursery rhyme ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’ actually refers to the Black Death which killed about 30 million people in the fourteenth-century.
- It was the custom in Ancient Rome for the men to place their right hand on their testicles when taking an oath. The modern term ‘testimony’ is derived from this tradition.
- Due to staggering inflation in the 1920’s, 4,000,000,000,000,000,000 German marks were worth 1 US dollar.
- During the Medieval Crusades, transporting bodies off the battlefield for burial was a major problem, this was solved by carrying a huge cauldron into the Holy wars, boiling down the bodies, and taking only the bones with them.