Thanks for posting this... it was a very interesting article!
Why not? The BBC trusts men who claim to be able to get pregnant and menstruate.
Actually there are a couple of narratives by Europeans who went to the Mongol court before Marco Polo so they describe the Silk Road. But they didn’t go to all the other places Polo visited.
Marco Polo was a Venetian. His father was one of the men who created “The Silk Road” to China. Young Marco went to China with his father and when he finally returned home many years later, his tales were so full of what the Venetians reckoned to have been exaggerations (our out-and-out lies), they took to calling him, “Il Milione” (the millions). The neighborhood where he and his family lived became known as “la Piazza dei Milioni” (the plaza of the millions).
In keeping with Polo’s tradition of exaggeration, modern Venice has two plazas known as “la Piazza dei Milioni.”