Corliss, whose Sourcebook Project compiled these anomalies into a series of books: One source for some of these kinds of facts is the work of the physicist William R. These are the grist for scientific progress. But the good news is that each of these pieces of knowledge are wedges that we can use to pry open our understanding of the world. Whether it’s the discovery of a weird signal from Proxima Centauri or the fact that lightning can spur the growth of fungi, there’s a lot that we don’t fully understand yet. They’re still there in Scotland, cheerfully serving up pints and shearing sheep.There is a certain delight to finding facts and bits of information that don’t quite make sense. The Picts outlasted the Western Romans by some 500 years until Pictish identity gave way to more contemporary Gaelic Scottish culture.

Rome’s inability to bring the Picts and Scots to heel resulted in the famous loss of the 9th Legion and later, the building of Hadrian’s Wall. This would have seemed barbarous to your average Roman citizen. The Romans called them Picts (literally “painted people”) because of their body-painting and tattooing customs. So it is with the Picts, first recorded by the Romans after the empire made a province of Britain in the early 100s AD.

But this is an illusion something that happens when only certain societies are literate, and information about your neighbor’s neighbors is scarce.

To paraphrase history podcaster Dan Carlin, one of the cool things about pre-modern history is how suddenly people who were previously unrecorded tended to arrive - fully formed and ready to kick your ass. In the centuries around the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe experienced vast migrations of so-called “barbarians.” Many of them went on to rule the empire’s former provinces.Ī stone in Scotland carved with Pictish symbols. An honest mistakeīede’s assumption that the Picts must have arrived from elsewhere was reasonable. The similarities are unmistakable, according to the paper’s authors. The researchers sequenced the genomes of two Pictish skeletons, then compared the data to similarly sequenced genomes of other British iron-age people. Translation? The Picts didn’t “come” from anywhere - they came to power as a subgroup of the Celtic people living in Britain for hundreds of years. “ we can firmly place the genomes within the Iron Age gene pool in Britain and demonstrate regional biological affinity,” they continue. “To date, no comprehensive analysis of Pictish genomes has been published, and questions about their biological relationships to other cultural groups living in Britain remain unanswered,” the paper’s authors write in its abstract.

Unknown Earth by William R. Corliss