This Week in History

For some reason this blog seems to be tracking a number of history stories.  Here are some more

Satellite photos seem to have revealed a Viking settlement in North America.

Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.

In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.

And Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite commando and lifelong fascist, became a hit man for Mossad.  The mission?  Kill German scientists.

The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

It looks as if the Hobbits died out 50,000 years ago.  Can this be used to date the action in Lord of the Rings?

The new information, gathered between 2007 and 2014, suggests that all of the Homo floresiensis fossils are between 100,000 and 60,000 years old.

And Shakespeare’s head is probably missing.

A hi-tech investigation of William Shakespeare’s grave has concluded his skull was probably stolen. 

The discovery gives credence to a news report in 1879, later dismissed as fiction, that trophy hunters took the skull from his shallow grave in 1794. 

A team used a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scan to look through the grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford in the first archaeological probe of the site.

Of course, curst be he who moves my bones and all that.  But it would be pretty cool if the skull ended up in a production of Hamlet.