Action off Cartagena, 28 May 1708. Oil by Samuel Scott.[/caption]
With the help of an underwater autonomous vehicle, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was able to locate and observe the shipwreck for the first time in 2015. The project has been kept secret, says Rob Munier, WHOI’s vice president for marine facilities and operations: “We’ve been holding this under wraps out of respect for the Colombian government.”
New details about the discovery have recently been released with permission from the agencies involved in the search, including the Colombian government.
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The wreck was partially sediment-covered, but with the camera images from the lower altitude REMUS missions, the crew was able to see new details, such as ceramics and other artefacts. REMUS image, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution[/caption]
Modern Strasbourg. Photo by R Roletschek.[/caption]
Finding a cure
The city’s council was tasked with finding a cure for the curse. Frau Troffea may have been taken off into the mountains, but the remaining afflicted were subject to panicked ideas of treatment.
At first, it was thought that the plague came from ‘hot blood,’ and as such, only continued dancing could sweat it out. The council erected a stage, hired musicians and dancers and made sure that the afflicted continued to dance at a fast pace.
Matters worsened. Many of those hired fell subject to the curse, as did petrified onlookers. Within a few days, the council’s theory of forcing the dance to extinguish ‘hot blood’ had been discredited.
For the dancers, medical attentions were irrelevant. They needed the mercy of St. Vitus and support from a neglectful Church. Luckily, the flattering attentions of priests were about to be bestowed upon them.
They were given sacred red shoes and started a pilgrimage to Saverne. It involved a gruelling climb to a remote monastery, which was thick with incense and candle smoke. This extravagant ritual awoke something in their deep-rooted piety. Between holy relics and religious imagery, they had reason to believe the curse would be raised. and the curse was lifted.
Why did the pilgrimage lift the curse?
Dr. John Waller, author of A Time To Dance, A Time To Die, hypothesises that ‘the large number of people who recovered through the power of religious suggestion reveals that even when self-awareness is impaired, our minds can still receive, process and respond to appropriate external stimuli.’
These were a people calling out for attention from the Church. They’d been neglected for years, but in the recent weeks, civic and religious leaders had changed their attitudes toward their flock. Just as neglect has immense psychological potential, so too does religious attention.
Cultural conventions and pathological anxiety
In the decades that followed, Martin Luther’s attractively egalitarian ideals diverted the Christian psyche away from supernaturalism. Outbreaks of choreomania disappeared; but the phenomenon provides a fundamental commentary on group psychosis.
Biologically speaking, 500 years is not a long time. When under pressure, the human brain still causes relatively expected behaviour. A person may appear to have lost control completely, but they still reflect some kind of cultural prescription.
Whether supernatural or not, cultural conventions play a key role in the expression of pathological anxiety. Set in the context of a people who feared St. Vitus, the dancing plague of Strasbourg offers us a fascinating insight into the ways pathological anxiety can play out.]]> 
The DNA test uses some of the most advanced autosomal testing technology. Science combines with the store of information now available on line to map ethnicity going back through multiple generations. This is all achieved through a simple saliva test. The test looks at a person’s entire genome and covers both the maternal and paternal sides of the family tree.
However, some pundits maintain that ethnic testing is not reliable. The methods used for ancestral DNA testing are not the same as DNA testing for other purposes. The autosomal testing base is considered to be one the less reliable forms of DNA testing.
Further, the results are partly based on responses from a pool of other people who have had similar testing, what are described as a reference population. So the results could come across as a little skewed. Arguably until many more people have put themselves forward for ethnicity testing, there will remain naturally limiting factors.
Some ethnicities are easier to identify than others, for example, Jewish results seem to be highly accurate. But if you look at the evolution of the European landmass, war followed by shifting borders followed by more war and so on, most Europeans are actually an ethnic mix. In the same way, the inhabitants of the British Isles are a mix of invaders and the resident population who were themselves probably also invaders at an earlier point in time.
Living ancestry is becoming a real thing and there are people who create heritage tours. These are based on documented evidence of past family members and genetic testing. The idea is to make it possible for you to stand on the same soil as your ancestors. But ethnicity testing has a long way to go if it is going to catch up and compete with hard historical evidence when it comes to clear and factual accuracy.
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The Middle East department at the museum has a huge collection of clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. Dr Finkel’s department researches and decodes the inscriptions, linking the tablets together where possible to provide a linear story. This is where the true revelation about Noah’s Ark came from.
Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing used in the Middle East. The word, Cuneiform, means wedge-shaped and indeed the script comprises wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets.
A clay tablet of some 4,000 years old in the British Museum has revealed that the famed vessel was, in fact, round and not as has been thought and portrayed, rectangular. Not only has the tablet revealed this piece of information but it has also detailed the materials used to build the ark and the precise measurements. The discovery was a chance find made by deciphering the Cuneiform and linking it to other tablets to compile the ancient Babylonian story, the Story of the Flood.
The ark was constructed out of wooden ribs and palm fibre rope with hot bitumen used after construction to render the vessel waterproof. The instructions were given by a Mesopotamian god and the dimensions are translated to be 3,600 square metres, with walls to a height of six metres. This equates to an area around two thirds the size of a modern football field. The sixty lines on the tablet also include the order that the animals must enter, ‘two by two’.
The odds surrounding this discovery were revealed to be even greater when the story of how the tablet came into the possession of the Museum was recounted by Dr. Finkel. A man called Douglas Simmonds came into the museum with a clay tablet which he wanted identified, a normal day at the office for Dr. Finkel. The tablet was a family piece given to the owner by his father as a reward for passing his exams. The tablet had been acquired by Mr Simmonds’ father, Leonard, along with a few other less interesting bits and pieces in the late 1940s after serving with the RAF in the Middle East.
This unique tablet recounts the story of the ark and is far older than the known biblical accounts. Finkel has described the discovery of the tablet as one of the most important human records ever found but in a shocking paradox, is absolute in his belief that the ark never actually existed.
The tablet remains on display at the British Museum where it has been since 2014 on loan from Mr Simmonds.]]> 
Russian pickpocketry takes on a different form now in this modern age, and with arguably a far greater reach than merely arms’ length. Russia has a fearsome reputation as home to some of the most deadly and serious cyberhacking groups such as Anonymous International and the Koobface Gang. They are to modern cyber crime what their villainous ancestors were to the pockets and valuables of eighteenth century Russia.
Sometimes hackers are motivated by political ideology and a cause to believe in but Russian hackers simply seem intent on emptying other peoples’ bank accounts, and not a thieves’ coin in sight.
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Still so relevant today in modern conflicts in the Arab state, the RAF is held in great affection by the British people. The UK is awash with a year of events and celebrations to mark the first one hundred years of the RAF.
With an eye watering budget of £8 million, concerts, flypast and tattoos are all planned. A commemorative £2 coin has been struck by the Royal Mint featuring five different designs.
The Ministry of Defence has released an iconic set of pictures to tell the story of the RAF through the decades. Some of the pictures have been colourised by an expert which is a relatively modern technique designed to breathe life into old pictures. The colourised versions convey a depth of feeling and atmosphere that is not present in the black and white originals.]]> 
Remains of the Clotilda[/caption]
All of the slaves were either sold or kept for personal use by Meaher and Foster. After the Civil War in 1865 when he became free, Kossola along with other former slaves founded Africatown in Alabama, where they remained and where Hurston came to interview him in the late twenties.
The author spent a lot of time living in Africatown with Kossola, where the men spoke their own language and kept up their traditional, African customs. She walked alongside Kossola as he cleaned the church and accompanied him on his crabbing trips to the bay. Some of their time was spent in silence, itself speaking volumes about Kossola’s loss of his people and homeland even after so many years.
Her time spent with Kossola moved Zora Hurston hugely and she was profoundly affected by his story. During one of her last visits to his home, she asked to photograph him. Kossola appeared in his best suit but without any shoes. He told Hurston that he wanted to look like he would if he were in Africa as this is where he really wanted to be.
This work was one of her earliest projects following the end of her studies; Hurston studied Anthropology at Barnard College and then Howard University. Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance which was an intellectual and social movement within Harlem during the 1920s also sometimes known as, ‘the New Negro Movement’.
Her Biography, ‘Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston’ by Valerie Boyd portrays the effect that the interviews with Kossola had on Hurston quite vividly. Hurston’s work is truly unique because it is the first hand testimony of a man who was there, a living record from a truly shameful period of history.]]> 
