Two infants were buried some 2,100 years ago wearing “helmets” made from the skulls of other children, archaeologists have discovered.
The remains of the two infants were found with nine other burials at a site called Salango, on the coast of central Ecuador. The archaeologists who excavated the burials between 2014 and 2016 recently published the details of their findings in the journal Latin American Antiquity.
The team says this is the only known case in which children’s skulls were used as helmets for infants being buried. The scientists don’t know what killed the infants and children.
The helmets were placed tightly over the infants’ heads, the archaeologists found. It’s likely that the older children’s skulls still had flesh on them when they were turned into helmets, because without flesh, the helmets likely would not have held together, the archaeologists noted.
One infant’s “face looked through and out of the cranial vault” — the space in the skull that holds the brain — the archaeologists wrote. Read more.
actually there were 0 time travellers on the Titanic, because the time cops have an entire outpost to safeguard that one particular point in history. every rookie spends a least a month on Titanic duty and they all complain bitterly about it since it is, essentially, the time travel equivalent of being the guard who has to stop tourists from licking the Liberty Bell.
listen. LISTEN. there’s going to be somebody, maybe several somebodies, at the travel hub who’s dressed nice and knows all the right words and swears back and forth that they can sell you the credentials that will get you into the Titanic’s timespace. they’ll sell you IDs that pass you and your friends off as 23rd century history students or, worse, some 24th century brats who will go crying to their corporate sponsors if you ruin their paid vacation.
the IDs will look very impressive. they will not come cheap. they will not help you.
there’s no checkpoint to bluff your way through and nobody who wants to hear you try. if you try to time travel anywhere near the Titanic, whether you try to board with all the other passengers or appear on the boat in the middle of the voyage, you will get slammed directly into a whitespace dragnet - a time bubble, in layman’s terms.
and you will be surrounded by at least a dozen time cops, all of whom are bored and cranky and very eager to flex their newfound authority, which means they will absolutely detain you for as long as possible and insist on giving you a lecture when a slap on the wrist would do. if you talk back they might double your fine or even suspend your chronal permissions for up to a year.
and then they’ll send you back to the hub in your period piece clothing that will suddenly look very stupid, and the guys who sold you the ideas will have fucked off to 1998 by then and you won’t have a chance in hell of getting your money back, and what I’m saying is that it’s not worth it, dude. it’s just not worth it.
