History

How fast is the world’s population growing?

According to estimates, more than 7 billion people live on our planet. Each day, some 200,000 new babies add to this figure, which works out to roughly 140 additional people per minute. Over an entire year, about 80 million humans are born—a number comparable to the combined populations of California, Texas and New York. Not every region of the world is witnessing this staggering rate of growth, however. In developed areas like Western Europe and Japan, the population has essentially stabilized, while in less developed countries fertility tends to be much higher. Even with this variation, experts predict that more than 9 billion people will jostle for space on Earth by 2050.

It wasn’t always this way. Population growth of such proportions is a relatively new phenomenon: Between 1900 and 2000, the number of people in the world quadrupled, and between 1700 and 2000 it climbed by a factor of 10. Indeed, for tens of thousands of years, the human populace expanded at tiny fractions of today’s 1.1-percent yearly rate. When our ancestors first turned to agriculture around 8000 B.C., an estimated 5 million people were scattered across the planet. By 1 A.D. that figure had climbed to roughly 200 million, increasing by only 0.05 percent each year. The population would continue to grow slowly but surely, although catastrophic scourges such as the Black Death—blamed for killing up to half of all Europeans during the 14th century—imposed periodic setbacks. When the Industrial Revolution took off in the mid-1700s, life expectancy trended upward as child mortality plummeted, resulting in a population explosion that brought the total number of humans to 1 billion by 1800.

source "www.history.com"

Where is Genghis Khan buried?

The mystery began on August 18, 1227, when Mongol leader Genghis Khan died of unknown causes while leading a military campaign in China. According to legend, Khan’s successors killed anyone who witnessed his funeral procession on its way back to the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Some 800 soldiers are said to have massacred the 2,000 people who attended his funeral, before being summarily executed themselves. Khan’s corpse was then placed in an unmarked grave to ensure his rest would be undisturbed. Horses trampled all evidence of the burial, and some say a river was diverted to flow over the site. As a result of these extreme measures, the location of Khan’s tomb has remained unknown for almost 900 years.

Most experts believe Khan was buried somewhere near his birthplace in Khentii Aimag, northeastern Mongolia, and that his descendants may be buried there along with him—but they don’t have much more to go on than that. Researchers weren’t even allowed in the area until after the Soviet occupation of Mongolia ended in the 1990s. And in the decades since, various groups have been pressured to give up their searches due to protests from the Mongolian government and public that excavation would disturb the rest of their national hero.

Such opposition has not halted the hunt. In 2004 Japanese-Mongolian researchers discovered the remains of what they think is Khan’s palace complex on the grassy steppe of Khentii Province, 150 miles east of the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator; they believe his tomb may be somewhere nearby. And since 2008, the Valley of the Khans Project has been using cutting-edge technology to search for Khan’s final resting place. The project has enlisted thousands of “citizen scientists” to comb through high-resolution satellite images of the region looking for possible clues, giving amateurs with a home computer and an Internet connection a rare chance to help solve one of history’s most enduring riddles.

source "www.history.com"

Did Marie-Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake”?

It’s one of the most famous quotes in history. At some point around 1789, when being told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette (bride of France’s King Louis XVI) supposedly sniffed, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”—“Let them eat cake.” With that callous remark, the queen became a hated symbol of the decadent monarchy and fueled the revolution that would cause her to (literally) lose her head several years later. But did Marie-Antoinette really say those infuriating words? Not according to historians. Lady Antonia Fraser, author of a biography of the French queen, believes the quote would have been highly uncharacteristic of Marie-Antoinette, an intelligent woman who donated generously to charitable causes and, despite her own undeniably lavish lifestyle, displayed sensitivity towards the poor population of France.

That aside, what’s even more convincing is the fact that the “Let them eat cake” story had been floating around for years before 1789. It was first told in a slightly different form about Marie-Thérèse, the Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660. She allegedly suggested that the French people eat “la croûte de pâté” (or the crust of the pâté). Over the next century, several other 18th-century royals were also blamed for the remark, including two aunts of Louis XVI. Most famously, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau included the pâté story in his “Confessions” in 1766, attributing the words to “a great princess” (probably Marie-Thérèse). Whoever uttered those unforgettable words, it was almost certainly not Marie-Antoinette, who at the time Rousseau was writing was only 10 years old—three years away from marrying the French prince and eight years from becoming queen.

source "www.history.com"

What happened to the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke?

The origins of one of the America’s oldest unsolved mysteries can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship to confront the mighty Spanish Armada. In August 1590, White finally returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have happened, apart from a single word—“Croatoan”—carved into a wooden post.

Investigations into the fate of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke have continued over the centuries, but no one has come up with a satisfactory answer. “Croatoan” was the name of an island south of Roanoke that was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Perhaps, then, the colonists were killed or abducted by Native Americans. Other hypotheses hold that they tried to sail back to England on their own and got lost at sea, that they met a bloody end at the hands of Spaniards who had marched up from Florida or that they moved further inland and were absorbed into a friendly tribe. In 2007, efforts began to collect and analyze DNA from local families to figure out if they’re related to the Roanoke settlers, local Native American tribes or both. Despite the lingering mystery, it seems there’s one thing to be thankful for: The lessons learned at Roanoke may have helped the next group of English settlers, who would found their own colony 17 years later just a short distance to the north, at Jamestown.

source "www.history.com"

What is the Bermuda Triangle?

A source of fascination for sailors, researchers and crackpots alike, the Bermuda Triangle is a roughly 500,000-square-mile expanse of the Atlantic Ocean located off the coast of Florida. Descriptions of its borders vary, but most accounts cite the three points of the “triangle” as Miami, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda. Reports of bizarre activity in the region date back to the days of Christopher Columbus, who reported unusual compass activity while traveling through it en route to the New World, but the Triangle would later earn a reputation as a dead zone for planes and ships after a string of unexplained disappearances in the 20th century. In 1945, five U.S. Navy aircraft known as “Flight 19” got lost and vanished in the triangle during a training mission. While the pilots most likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, no trace of the planes or their 14 crewmembers was ever found. Another famous mystery dates to 1963, when the tanker ship SS Marine Sulphur Queen sank near Key West, Florida. Life preservers and other items were later discovered drifting in the water, but the exact cause of the disaster remains unknown, and the wreck has never been recovered.

Writers like Charles Berlitz helped popularize the Bermuda Triangle mystery in the 1960s and 1970s, and its treacherous reputation has since been chalked up to everything from intergalactic portals and time vortexes to paranormal phenomena and even the lost city of Atlantis. But despite the hysteria, government organizations and shipping companies don’t show the triangle on any official maps, and groups ranging from the U.S. Coast Guard to the global insurance outfit Lloyd’s of London maintain that the region doesn’t have an unusually high rate of maritime disasters. Other skeptics note that the triangle sits in an area famous for rogue waves and storms, and they blame any disappearances on extreme ocean depths and the effects of the Gulf Stream, which can combine to quickly erase all evidence of plane crashes and shipwrecks.

source "www.history.com"