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Because of the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in the 1500s, Christmas ended up being celebrated 11 days earlier than before. When the change reached America in the 1750s, some people continued to observe December 25 as sacred and also marked January 6 as “Old Christmas.” This tradition held on strongly in Appalachia and remained part of Kentucky's holiday heritage as a parallel celebration alongside the newer Christmas date. The Forgotten Holiday Called 'Old Christmas' | 5:57 KET - Kentucky Educational Television | 44K subscribers | 47,374 views | November 26, 2025

A fiber-optic cable survey of the lake from Buffalo to Toronto alerted experts to an anomaly sitting on the lakebed, leading experts to surmise it could be the Rapid City vessel, an 1884-built schooner lost in 1917.Now, though, they don't think it can be that recent a wreckage.James Conolly, Trent University archaeologist and diver, said there were features that just weren't common for ships built after 1850, a period that experienced a bit of a technological leap for Great Lakes ships. Post-1850s ships had metal rigging, whereas the one found is rope-rigged. "It immediately puts it into, likely, the first...

Online claims of "large underground structures" discovered under Egypt's famed pyramids of Giza are unfounded, experts in the field say. The assertions stem from a YouTube video featuring three Italian researchers with no background in Egyptology or archaeology. The claims spread on social media after three researchers -- Corrado Malanga, Armando Mei and Filippo Biondi -- held a press conference March 22 and 23 on YouTube. "The pyramids are monumental stone structures, built on a flat plateau," said Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, doctor of Egyptology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (archived link). "They were then excavated or converted to include burial and...

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 was not the only amazing feat of American railroad engineering in history. In 1886, railways in the south managed to convert the gauge on an estimated 11,500 miles of track in a period of just 36 hours. The History Guy remembers the 1886 Southern Railroad Gauge Change, an important moment in railroad history. The Day The Gauge Changed | 10:05 The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.61M subscribers | 1,173,812 views | June 16, 2018

For years now my local town has had rumours of lost secret tunnels under the ground. So after a curious invote to the local pub I decided it was time to investigate all these claims once and for all. They Said SECRET TUNNELS Don't Exist... So I Went Looking | 13:56 Paul Whitewick | 216K subscribers | 57,776 views | December 7, 2025 00:00 - An Invite 01:43 - Two Maps 02:49 - Rumours 06:29 - Site 1 10:12 - Site 2 12:34 - However

...in the early 1990s two of Mike’s interests, numismatics and astronomy, came together. As Mike explored the astrological iconography on Roman coins he developed a theory for the "Magi's star.” He interpreted this event as a description of a remarkable pair of highly visible eclipses of Jupiter by the Moon. These occurred in the constellation Aries that was associated with King Herod and was likely interpreted as a sign of a major event. He presented his findings in a 1995 paper in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society and later in his 1999 Rutgers University Press book "The...

2,000-year-old Jerusalem city wall uncovered. The section of the wall unearthed at the Tower of David Museum is among the longest and most intact segments ever uncovered. JNS Staff. A section of Jerusalem’s city wall dating from the Hasmonean period more than two thousand years ago has been unearthed in the city’s Tower of David Museum, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Monday. The wall was discovered during an excavation on the grounds of the museum, located just inside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem, adjacent to the citadel, within the historic complex known as the Kishle,...

A lost 16th-century ship buried deep in a Namibian desert has stunned archaeologists with a treasure haul that rewrites the story of early global trade. In Namibia’s remote Sperrgebiet—a name that translates from German as “forbidden zone”—miners looking for diamonds stumbled upon something far more valuable: the buried wreck of a 16th-century Portuguese carrack, laden with gold, ivory, and copper. Preserved beneath the hyper-arid sands of the Namib Desert, the ship, identified as the Bom Jesus, disappeared in 1533 while en route to India. Discovered in 2008 within a high-security mining concession near Oranjemund, the site quickly drew attention from...

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, powerful antennas on the Mare Island shipyard picked up an urgent radio-telegram meant for U.S. Navy ships operating 3,600 miles away near Hawaii – “AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR – THIS IS NO DRILL.” That was the first stateside word about the devastating surprise attack by Japanese warplanes. The strafing and bombing started just before 8 a.m. Hawaii time, or 10:30 a.m. PST on Mare Island under the time zone system used in 1941. The radio message went out immediately from Pearl Harbor, and was relayed to top Navy brass in San Francisco by...

Before WiFi or Morse code, ancient civilizations used fire to send messages across empires. From China’s Great Wall to Byzantium’s time-coded relays, each era made the system faster and smarter. Featuring Lance Geiger of The History Guy, The Rise of Civilization is a documentary series that combines expert interviews with cutting-edge photorealistic AI recreations to reveal how the inventions, systems, and ideas of the ancient world shaped the foundations of our modern one. The Rise of Civilization | 12,413 views | November 5, 2025

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered 225 shabtis -- figurines meant to act as servants for the deceased in the afterlife -- that belonged to the pharaoh Shoshenq III inside a tomb of a different pharaoh.The figurines were found at the site of Tanis, in northern Egypt, in the northern chamber of the tomb of Osorkon II, near an unmarked sarcophagus. Hieroglyphs on the shabtis allowed the team to identify who they belonged to.Although the tomb and sarcophagus were discovered in 1939, the shabtis were recently found by an Egyptian-French team that is conducting conservation work, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism...

Archaeologists are peeling back the myth of the Roman Legionary, using incredible new discoveries from Britain's Vindolanda and Gaul's Lugdunum. By excavating 2,000-year-old barracks, sewers, and mass graves, they uncover perfectly preserved artifacts, from intimate letters and children's shoes to macabre human remains. This documentary reveals a vibrant, human side to the Roman soldier while exposing the brutal reality and fratricidal violence of life on the empire's frontier and in its great cities. Recovering Lost Artifacts From An Ancient Roman Mass Grave | 52:13 Unearthed History - Archaeology Documentaries | 242K subscribers | 19,297 views | November 30, 2025

At an off-the-record meeting held on November 21, 1962 with NASA Administrator James Webb, NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans, and Special Assistant to the President Jerome Wiesner, President Kennedy states clearly that his administration's priority is for the United States to land on the Moon before the Soviet Union. Listening In: JFK on Getting to the Moon (November 21, 1962) | 4:04 John F. Kennedy Library Foundation | 136K subscribers | 931,620 views | October 11, 2012

Around 8,000 years ago, a vast stretch of land connected Britain to mainland Europe. This lost world, known as Doggerland, was a thriving Mesolithic landscape teeming with mammoth, deer, and human communities. But everything changed with a catastrophic event that submerged this Stone Age Eden beneath the rising waters of the North Sea. In 1931, fishermen accidentally pulled prehistoric bones and tools from the seafloor, marking the first modern discovery of Doggerland. Since then, especially from the 1990s through 2019, archaeologists and scientists have used sonar scans, seabed sampling, and digital reconstructions to piece together what life was like in...

This video features an extremely rare decadrachm of Alexander the Great - a coin that the conqueror himself might have presented to one of his officers. Alexander the Great held this coin (maybe) | 4:14 Toldinstone Footnotes | 44.2K subscribers | 3,217 views | December 2, 2025 Coins [Toldinstone Footnotes search]

Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient Mesoamerican cultures.For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the "Pecos River Style," inside remote limestone rock shelters.These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall...Though the desert climate perfectly preserved these significant American works, researchers only recently attempted to date the tradition...To pinpoint the art's origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed...

IntroductionThe Old Copper Complex, also known as the Old Copper Culture, refers to the items made by early inhabitants of the Great Lakes region during a period that spans several thousand years and covers several thousand square miles. The most conclusive evidence suggests that native copper was utilized to produce a wide variety of tools beginning in the Middle Archaic period circa 4,000 BC. The vast majority of this evidence comes from dense concentrations of Old Copper finds in eastern Wisconsin. These copper tools cover a broad range of artifact types: axes, adzes, various forms of projectile points, knives, perforators,...

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position. (Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU) In A Nutshell * Scientists matched a mysterious 3.4-million-year-old fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia to Australopithecus deyiremeda, a human ancestor that lived alongside Lucy’s species but retained tree-climbing abilities. * The discovery shows human evolution wasn’t a straight path from trees to ground. While Lucy’s species evolved rigid feet for walking, A. deyiremeda kept feet that could both walk and climb, plus ate different foods from forest environments. * A juvenile jaw with distinctive teeth from the same site as the foot provided the missing link....

A third shape hidden in the infamous Vitruvian Man drawing suggests an even deeper understanding of human anatomy than previously known. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * A London-based dentist spotted a “hidden in plain sight” third shape within Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing. * The 1490 illustration was originally created to demonstrate a principle theorized by the Roman architect Vitruvius—that the human body could proportionally fit within both a circle and a square. * The dentist noticed that a third shape in the drawing—a triangle between the figure’s legs—was reminiscent of a dental...

Back in April of 2020, a British family who was stuck at home during the pandemic lockdown busied themselves with some yardwork at their home in Hampstead and ended up unearthing a cache of 69 gold coins from the Tudor period. The family, who have asked to remain anonymous, registered the remarkable find with the British Museum's Portable Antiquities Scheme, but the discovery was not publicly announced at the time. The coins are all dated between the 1420s and 1530s, showing the images of the four English kings from that time period: Henry VI, Edward IV, Henry VII, and Henry...