History

[Panflute]

"Prehistory? In MY history thread?"

It's more likely than you think. 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Why does Roman concrete last so much longer than ours?

Concrete with a two thousand year lifespan.

Roman concrete has mostly stood the test of time. The Pantheon for example was dedicated in 128 CE and has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Today, it’s still intact.

Even some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome.

On the other hand – In your town or city you probably have at least one piece of brutalist architecture. Big in the 50s and 60s, these now controversial concrete structures were considered utilitarian and long lasting. Yet today, without restoration, some of these reinforced concrete buildings have begun to crumble.

Researchers from MIT think they have the answer to Roman concrete’s millennia long success – white specks called lime clasts.

Lime clasts are small white chunks which originate from lime, found ubiquitously through Roman concrete but not in modern day concrete.

“Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Professor Admir Masic, an MIT civil and environmental engineer.

“These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

We understand quite a bit about how the Romans used to make concrete from ancient scholars Vitruvius and Pliny, who wrote about the strict specifications for the materials.

However, Masic wasn’t sure which type of lime the Romans would have been using.

It was assumed that when lime was incorporated into Roman concrete, it was first slacked –combined with water to form a highly reactive paste-like material. But this process alone could not account for the presence of the lime clasts

“Was it possible that the Romans might have actually directly used lime in its more reactive form, known as quicklime?” he says.

Researchers used spectroscopic examination to provide clues that the calcium carbonate had been formed at extreme temperatures. This would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture.

Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature.

“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says.

“First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”

The team believe that these lime clasts could be ‘self-healing’ when cracks begin to form.

To prove that this was the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks.

Within two weeks the cracks in the ancient formula had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample.

However, this isn’t the first time that we thought we’d uncovered the secret to Roman concrete’s longevity. Researchers back in 2017 discovered that seawater in the manufacturing process also strengthened Roman concrete.

Concrete is one of the most used substances on earth – second only to water. With tens of billion tonnes of concrete used every year, finding ways to make it last longer or use less is an important goal.

Perhaps Roman concrete still has more secrets deep inside its long-lasting shell.

The research has been published in Science Advances.

Correction: 11/01/2023. The original post used an image of the Parthenon, which was corrected to Pantheon.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/roman-concrete-lime-mit-brutalism-hot/

 

Edited January 19, 2023 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Scientists put a 2,000-year-old mummy through a CAT scan and, boy oh boy, that’s a little too much detail!

Ancient burial practices give new meaning to the term ‘golden boy’

Meet Golden Boy: A wealthy Egyptian teenager who’s waited a very long time for his first CAT scan.

Over two millennia, in fact.

The cloth wrapped and embalmed mummy of the adolescent, encased in an elaborate sarcophagus, was fed into the scanner by Egyptian scientists curious to see what was within its burial container.

In doing so, the wooden coffin, first discovered more than a century ago in a cemetery south of Cairo, will remain closed, ensuring the child continues to rest easy.

Analysis of the scans found Golden Boy’s name is well deserved – his family were evidently high up in during Late Ptolemaic Egyptian society.

He was decorated with dozens of amulets – mostly gold – carefully arranged on top or within his body.

A golden heart scarab amulet was placed within his chest cavity and a golden tongue within his mouth.

The detail of the scan even detected a two-finger amulet – exclusively given to the Egyptian dead – next to his uncircumcised penis.

Dr Sahar Saleem from Cario University who led the study says the mummy is an important example of burial rituals practised by the ancient Egyptians.

“This mummy’s body was extensively decorated with 49 amulets, beautifully stylised in a unique arrangement of three columns between the folds of the wrappings and inside the  body cavity,” Saleem says.

“These include the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the akhet amulet of the horizon, the placenta, the Knot of Isis, and others. Many were made of gold, while some were made of semiprecious stones, fired clay, or faience.

“Their purpose was to protect the body and give it vitality in the afterlife.”

Golden Boy was, in real life, aged around 14-15, around 128cm and, according to the researchers, the possessor of an impressive dental record: no cavities, tooth loss or disease.

Aside from his evident wealth detected in the CT scan, he was also found wearing a golden head mask and white sandals, which Saleem says were “probably meant to enable the boy to walk out of the coffin”, upon entering the afterlife.

“Bouquets of plants and flowers were placed beside the deceased at the time of burial: this was done with the mummies of the New Kingdom kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, and Ramesses the Great.”

While Golden Boy’s heart remained in place, most of his other internal organs were removed.

His heart was protected – as described in the Book of the Dead – by a scarab, which is intended to quell the Egyptian’s heart when it was judged. The researchers suggest this finding indicates ancient Egyptians valued their children and sought to protect them as they passed into the afterlife. 

Despite spending two millennia in the Nag el–Hassaya cemetery, and the last century sleeping soundly in the museum’s basement, Golden Boy is now set for a noisier future as part of the main display upstairs.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/2000-year-old-mummy-cat-scan/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Arctic monkeys: 52-million-year-old primate relatives are earliest sign of primates near prehistoric north pole

Their environment would have been a warm swamp.

Fossil primate relatives from 52-million-years ago have been found north of the Arctic circle for the first time. Two early primates have been identified from fragments of jaws and teeth.

Today, primates almost exclusively live in warm, tropical environments, so it may come as a surprise that their ancestors lived so far north.

But, 50 million years ago during the geological epoch called the Eocene, substantial global warming effects made the Earth much warmer. In fact, the Eocene (which lasted from around 56 million to 34 million years ago) was the warmest period during the Cenozoic era – the era which spans the last 66 million years since the Age of Dinosaurs.

The Eocene is, therefore, a crucial case study of how ecosystems react to climate change.

“Global warming is transforming Arctic ecosystems in ways that are difficult to predict, but ancient episodes of global warming show how future changes in the Arctic might unfold. The first primate-like fossils ever recovered north of Arctic Circle show that these tropically adapted mammals were able to colonize the Arctic during an ancient episode of global warming approximately 52 million years ago, by adopting a new diet of nuts and seeds that enabled them to survive six months of winter darkness,” the authors write in a paper published in PLOS ONE.

Both the ancient primate relatives, named Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae, were found on Ellesmere Island in Canada.

Sitting well above the Arctic circle, average temperatures on the island today average 3.3°C in the warmest month, July, plummeting to an average of -38°C in February.

But during the Eocene, global mean annual surface temperatures are estimated to have been 13°C higher than in the late 20^th century. There were no permanent ice caps. And the polar regions were very different.

Ellesmere Island 52 million years ago would have been home to a swamp-like environment.

But even with the warmer temperatures, fossils of early primate relatives in North America have been restricted to much lower latitudes, prompting palaeontologists to suggest that the two newly discovered species were descended from a common ancestor who possessed a spirit “to boldly go where no primate has gone before.”

“No primate relative has ever been found at such extreme latitudes,” says lead author Kristen Miller, a PhD student at the University of Kansas. “They’re more usually found around the equator in tropical regions. I was able to do a phylogenetic analysis, which helped me understand how the fossils from Ellesmere Island are related to species found in midlatitudes of North America – places like New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Even down in Texas we have some fossils that belong to this family as well.

”None of these species are related to squirrels, but I think that’s the closest critter that we have that helps us visualize what they might have been like. They were most likely very arboreal – so, living in the trees most of the time.”

The pair also have teeth and jaws which suggest they ate hard food items, likely for feeding on tougher foods during long, dark Arctic winters where softer meals were hard to come by.

“A lot of what we do in paleontology is look at teeth – they preserve the best,” Miller explains. “Their teeth are just super weird compared to their closest relatives. So, what I’ve been doing the past couple of years is trying to understand what they were eating, and if they were eating different materials than their middle-latitude counterparts.”

The team think the early primate relatives were forced to survive on nuts and seeds during the relatively harsh polar winter.

“That, we think, is probably the biggest physical challenge of the ancient environment for these animals,” adds corresponding author Dr Chris Beard, also at the University of Kansas. “How do you make it through six months of winter darkness, even if it’s reasonably warm? The teeth, and even the jaw muscles of these animals, changed compared to their close relatives from midlatitudes. To survive those long Arctic winters, when preferred foods like fruits were not available, they had to rely on ‘fallback foods’ like nuts and seeds.”

The researchers suggest that, while warmer temperatures prompted some organisms to move north, long periods of Arctic darkness may still have been a limiting factor in which animals and plants survived.

“It does show how something like a primate, or a primate relative that’s specialized to one environment, can change based off of climate change,” Miller says. “I think probably what it says is primates’ range could expand with climate change or move at least towards the poles rather than the equator. Life starts to get too hot there, perhaps we’ll have a lot of taxa moving north and south, rather than the intense biodiversity we see at the equator today.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/earliest-arctic-primate/

---

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Nearly 600 obsidian handaxes from 1.2 million years ago found in Ethiopia show early humans were smarter than we think

Handaxes are the longest-used tool in human history.

A trove of nearly 600 obsidian handaxes, dating back at least 1.2 million years, has been unearthed in Ethiopia, indicating the presence of a prehistoric “knapping workshop”.

Knapping is the technique used to create handaxes, which are often referred to as humanity’s “first great invention.”

Made by chipping shards off a piece of stone to make a sharp edge, handaxes were not attached to handles, but held in the hand. They have a distinctive teardrop or pear shape. They were made out of flint or, later, obsidian – a type of volcanic glass.

The first handaxes in the palaeontological record date back to at least 1.5 million years ago and were found in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. Handaxes are believed to have spread throughout Africa, south Asia, the Middle East and Europe around 500,000 years ago. They were still being made as recently as 40,000 years ago.

No other cultural artefact is known to have been made for such a long time.

Prior research has suggested that knapping workshops first cropped up in the prehistoric record in Europe several hundred thousand years ago – up to 774,000 years ago. The Ethiopian find nearly doubles the earlier estimates.

The researchers found 578 handaxes buried in sediment, all but three of which were made of obsidian. They were able to estimate the age of the tools by analysing the material around them.

Studying the axes revealed that their construction was similar, indicating an ancient knapping workshop had been discovered.

It is unclear exactly which hominins produced the tools. A likely candidate appears to be Homo erectus, which emerged around 2 million years ago in Africa and disappears from the fossil record as recently as around 100,000 years ago.

What the research does show, however, is a level of planning often ascribed to later human ancestors. The handaxes were pre-crafted and stored, suggesting the concept of imagination and preparation existed in these prehistoric human ancestors 1.2 million years ago.

“It has been argued that, in earlier times, multiple activities of everyday life were all uniformly conducted at the same spot. The separation of focused activities across different localities, which indicates a degree of planning, according to this mindset, characterizes later hominins,” the researchers write.

The study is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/obsidian-handaxe-workshop/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Decrypted letters discovered to come from a shock source: Mary, Queen of Scots

Found by accident, from people who decrypt for a hobby.

A computer scientist, a pianist and a physicist walk into an archive…and stumble upon over 50,000 words of encrypted letters, written by Mary, Queen of Scots, more than 400 years ago.

Or, more seriously: three cryptologists have, in their spare time, cracked the code on a stack of encrypted letters they found in an online archive – and discovered that the letters had been penned by Mary Stuart.

Their discovery is published in the journal Cryptologia.

Mary, Queen of Scots had a tumultuous life, concluding with a 19-year imprisonment in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I followed by a charge of treason and her execution on 8 February 1587.

During imprisonment, she had an extensive and largely secret correspondence with her supporters in the outside world. These newly decrypted letters were written between 1578 and 1584, and mostly addressed to Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, the French ambassador in England at the time.

The letters are held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (France’s national library) and available in their online archive, but they were listed in the catalogue as being from the 1520s and 1530s, and linked to Italian affairs.

“Upon deciphering the letters, I was very, very puzzled and it kind of felt surreal,” says first author Dr George Lasry, a computer scientist and member of the DECRYPT Project – a multidisciplinary group from several European universities, which aims to map, digitise and decrypt historical ciphers.

“We have broken secret codes from kings and queens previously, and they’re very interesting, but with Mary Queen of Scots it was remarkable as we had so many unpublished letters deciphered and because she is so famous.”

Lasry, along with cryptology enthusiasts Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo (who are a pianist and a physicist in their day jobs, respectively), used a combination of computer and manual techniques to decode the letters.

“The code was moderately complex compared to other ciphers of the time and took us a while to crack,” says Lasry.

“There are 191 distinct symbols, and this required multiple rounds of analysis, the first one being computerized (30-40% of the text decrypted), and the rest requiring manual work – linguistic and contextual analysis.”

Mary employed techniques like using multiple different symbols for common letters, which prevents people from using frequency analysis to break the code, as well as using single symbols to denote common names or places.

A computer algorithm called hill climbing got the researchers an initial key to work with, from which they could start to decrypt manually. But the most intensive work, according to Lasry, was transcribing the 150,000-some symbols in the letters for a computer to read in the first place.

“It took a few weeks to start cracking the code and reading some parts, but the transcription work and the deciphering & interpretation of the decrypted text – 50,000 words in total – took most of the time.

“We started this project in early 2022 and worked until the end of 2022, all in our free time. But this was a more rewarding effort, to read Mary Stuart’s secret correspondence for the first time after 400 years.”

As they began to decipher fragments, they noticed a few clues in the letters as to who may have written them.

“It emerged that the writer was in captivity, had a son, and was a woman, which could match Mary Stuart,” says Lasry.

“The definitive clue was the mention of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s first secretary and spymaster, who is well known for having spied on Mary during her captivity.”

British archives already had copies of a few of the letters, which helped confirm their source. But most of the 57 total letters found were unknown to historians.

The researchers suspect that inspecting physical documents, and more comprehensive online searches, would reveal yet more letters.

“These discoveries will be a literary and historical sensation. They mark the most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, for 100 years,” says Dr John Guy, a historian at the University of Cambridge, UK.

“I’d always wondered if Michel de Castelnau’s original versions of Mary’s 55 ciphered letters could turn up one day, buried in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris or perhaps somewhere else, unidentified because of the ciphering. And now they have.

“The letters show definitively that Mary, during the years of her captivity in England in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody, closely observed and actively involved herself in political affairs in Scotland, England and France, and was in regular contact, either directly, or indirectly through de Castelnau, with many of the leading political figures at Elizabeth I’s court.”

An example of this is a letter dated 20 January, 1580, reproduced and translated in the paper.

“If in this next parliament the succession is dealt with, please remember to speak to the queen of England on my behalf and to make the same pleas that I previously wrote to you,” writes Mary.

While they’ve provided summaries of the letters and a few complete reproductions in their paper, the codebreakers didn’t analyse the letters in depth – they say that’s a job for historians, and will likely take some time.

“It would also be great, potentially, to work with historians to produce an edited book of her letters deciphered, annotated, and translated,” says Lasry.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/decryption-mary-queen-of-scots/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

150-kg penguin that lived in New Zealand 55 million years ago is the new all-time heavyweight

The penguin would have been as tall as an average human.

Imagine a penguin waddling toward you. Adorable, right? Who doesn’t love penguins? Now imagine that penguin weighing more than 150 kilograms, looking you straight in the eye?

If you were to travel to New Zealand 55 million years ago, you might have exactly that experience. Fossil bones of penguins unearthed in 2016 and 2017 include two newly discovered penguin species, one of which is the largest known to science – more than three times the size of the largest living penguins.

The fossils were discovered in boulders that date to between 55.5 and 59.5 million years old on a beach in North Otago on New Zealand’s south island. That means the penguins were around within a few million years of the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Emperor penguins, the tallest and heaviest of all modern penguins, can reach approximately 120-130 centimetres in height and typically weigh between 25 and 45 kg.

Kumimanu fordycei, the larger of the two newly discovered prehistoric penguin species, would have tipped the scales at 154 kg and been as tall as an average human.

Even Petradyptes stonehousei, the other species discovered in North Otago, would have dwarfed today’s biggest penguins with a mass of 50 kg.

Palaeontologists, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, used laser scans to create digital models of the fossil bones of Kumimanu and Petradyptes. These models allowed the team to compare the fossil species with other prehistoric birds, and flying diving birds like auks, and modern penguins.

They were able to estimate the dimensions of the birds by measuring hundreds of modern penguin bones and predicted the long-extinct penguins’ mass using the dimensions of the flipper bones.

“Fossils provide us with evidence of the history of life, and sometimes that evidence is truly surprising,” says Dr Daniel Field from Cambridge in a Science X article. “Many early fossil penguins attained enormous sizes, easily dwarfing the largest penguins alive today.” For comparison, Field adds that K. fordycei would have weighed more than basketball player Shaquille O’Neal at his peak!

Kumimanu knocks out the previous all-time penguin heavyweight champion, Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which lived in Antarctica about 37 million years ago and weighed in at 116 kg.

Both new species show that penguins got very large very early in penguin evolution, millions of years before their flipper apparatus was fine-tuned. The team described their flippers as more primitive, with slender and exhibiting muscle attachment points that more closely resemble those of flying birds.

Dr Daniel Ksepka tells Science X: “Size conveys many advantages. A bigger penguin could capture larger prey, and more importantly it would have been better at conserving body temperature in cold waters. It is possible breaking the [45 kg] size barrier allowed the earliest penguins to spread from New Zealand to other parts of the world.”

The researchers also postulate that the penguins’ size may have allowed them to dive to greater depths than modern penguins.

Dr Daniel Thomas from Massey University in Auckland, NZ says large, warm-blooded marine animals living today can dive to great depths. “This raises questions about whether Kumimanu fordycei had an ecology that penguins today don’t have, by being able to reach deeper waters and find food that isn’t accessible to living penguins,” Thomas says.

The findings are detailed in a paper published in the Journal of Paleontology.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/largest-penguin-ever-nz/

 

Edited February 13, 2023 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

 

Ancient “toothy” wombat cousin found near Alice Springs sheds light on how today’s marsupials evolved

The animal is described as a cross between wombats and the extinct “marsupial lion”.

Mukupirna nambensis, a close relative of Mukupirna fortidentata. Credit: Peter Schouten (supplied).

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Animal sacrifice and cult activity in Arabia revealed in 7,000-year-old stone monument

Animal sacrifice and cult activity in Arabia revealed in 7,000-year-old stone monument.

Seven millennia ago, humans living in ancient Arabia built massive stone monuments where they sacrificed wild and domesticated animals as part of complex religious practices.....

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Waiter! There’s a sauropod in my soup! Dinosaur footprints in Chinese restaurant confirmed

The dino diner booked a reservation at the restaurant 100 million years before it was built.

A diner at a restaurant in China found what appeared to be footprints in the venue’s courtyard in July last year. Analysis has now verified that what the restaurant-goer found were indeed 100-million-year-old dino tracks......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Archaeology shows how hunter-gatherers fitted into southern Africa’s first city, 800 years ago

Where the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers meet, forming the modern border between Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, lies a hill that hardly stands out from the rest. One could easily pass it without realising its historical significance. It was on and around this hill that what appears to be southern Africa’s earliest state-level society and urban city, Mapungubwe, appeared around 800 years ago.....

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Deleted

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Animal mummies were sealed in their own coffins, now neutrons reveal their secrets

Egyptologists need not worry about hidden curses when handling ancient sarcophaguses – now they can perform their own magic to discover what lies within.

That ‘magic’ is neutron tomography......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Prehistoric “monster” was spineless after all

New technology has revealed one of the biggest secrets of the “Tully monster” (Tullimonstrum gregarium) – an animal that lived 300 million years ago, and whose fossils have confounded palaeontologists since it was discovered in the 1950s.......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Ancient pendant with 20,000-year-old human DNA found in Denisova Cave

Ancient human DNA has been extracted from a pendant made from a deer tooth dating roughly 19,000 to 25,000 years ago. The DNA indicates it may have been worn by a female of North Eurasian ancestry.

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

New prehistoric sabre-toothed cat species discovered in northern China

A newly-identified species of sabre-toothed cat which lived nine to ten million years ago has been found in northern China.......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Genetic study suggests new model for human evolution

A modern genomic study puts forward an alternative model to the “tree of life” picture for how modern humans evolved.

While it is widely accepted that modern humans, Homo sapiens, diverged from other human species in Africa before spreading around the world, when and how the split between modern humans and other hominoids, such as Neanderthals, continues to be an area of uncertainty.....

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Oldest hominin genetic data from more than 2-million-year-old fossils

Genetic data has been extracted from fossilised teeth from an ancient hominin which lived more than two million years ago.

Hominins – humans and our ancient relatives – first emerged in Africa an estimated seven million years ago. The Paranthropus robustus teeth from which the genetic information has been gleaned were found in a South African cave and date back to between 1.8 million and 2.2 million years ago.......

 

[MUFC]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Scientists wake worm from 46,000 year Siberian slumber

European researchers have revived a 46,000 year-old Siberian roundworm preserved in permafrost.

The animal was collected from the frozen burrow of Arctic gophers located about 40 metres below the surface, in never-thawed late Pleistocene permafrost in the northeastern Arctic.....

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Fossil of ancient three-eyed insect relative fills gap in animal evolution

A 520-million-year-old fossil of an arthropod relative of insects and crustaceans with 3 eyes fills a gap in our understanding of how these invertebrate animals evolved........

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

The Dunino Den: Ancient Scots druid site where stonework tells of an unearthly past

Nestled in the East Neuk of Fife a mere ten minutes away from St Andrews (Scotland’s famous home of Golf), visitors may stumble upon Dunino village which is often overlooked. As a Scottish peninsula with hundreds of communities under its name, this unsuspecting parish may seem like any other but is home to an ‘unusual’ strip of natural woodland where a pre-Christian holy site resides alongside Kinaldy Burn; the Dunino Den.......

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Ancient tree rings reveal largest ever solar storm 14,300 years ago

Analysis of ancient tree rings from the French Alps has revealed a massive solar storm – the largest ever identified to date – occurred about 14,300 years ago.

The clue – a spike in radiocarbon levels – was detected by an international team of scientists investigating ancient tree trunks, known as ‘subfossils’, or remains where the fossilisation process in incomplete........... 

 

[MUFC]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

French love letters that never reached their 18th century recipients

In 1758, as the Seven Years’ War raged, the French ship Galatée was captured by the British and its 181 crew members imprisoned.

A box of letters intended for the crew, written by their friends, fiancés and families in France, was sent to the British Admiralty, where it was put into storage and never reached the sailors.

And there it has sat, for 265 years, until now. A researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, has uncovered the box of 102 letters and opened them.....