The word Ainu means “human” or “people” in the language of Ainu, which belongs to the indigenous people of Japan and Russia that carry the same name. Primarily associated with Japan, the Ainu have had a rough road over the last several centuries – a pattern that mimics the indigenous peoples of America and other […]
Among the Chambri people of Papua New Guinea, boys as young as eleven years of age are given scars all over their torso that resemble the scales of a crocodile. The process involves making small cuts, and then deliberately infecting them with ash from plants to form a keloid scar (A type of thick, raised […]
“My honour has at last been satisfied. A week ago, a ‘dummer junge’ named Schwartz stepped on my dog’s tail and I challenged him. The fight took place yesterday. Schwartz got a bad slash on his left cheek, and I got two cuts, one just under my eye and the other on my head. The […]
The British empire in the 1890s spanned the globe from Canada to Africa, India, Australia and chunks of Asia. Stories abounded in the popular British press of explorers meeting Maori people with tattoos ‘chiseled’ into their faces, of the painted ‘red men’ of North America, and of rough ‘gunpowder’ tattoos carved into the arms of […]
Trepanning AKA Trepanation, AKA Trephination Imagine someone taking a really sharp rock and cutting your scalp, then flopping your scalp open like a wet rug and using a – probably – different rock to saw into your skull. They then make a roughly rectangular shape, pop out part of your skull bones, put your […]
It’s technically a labret. But like, the queen of labrets. The practice was once much more widespread in Africa, with some reports from the 1800s saying men and women of different tribes wore great lip plates in their lower (and sometimes upper) lips. Today, the Mursi are most famous for keeping up this tradition (Along […]
AKA Odd Mods 3 When you think of corsets, you probably think about those kooky Victorians and their tightlacing. You’re not wrong, and we’ll get to them in a bit. But the history of the corset goes back a lot further than that. Try 2000 BCE, on the island of Crete, where a culture we’ve come […]
Near the end of this week we plan to upgrade the server that our database is on and *hopefully* it will speed up search results! Added a “clear search X icon”, instead of automatically clearing your keywords when you click inside the keywords search box. You can now filter within the New and Restocked search results. Updated […]
Have you ever forgotten anything? I certainly have. For millions of people around the world suffering from brain damage, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, it’s a matter of life and death. Now what if you could have a hard drive implanted in your brain? As your brain fails, the hard drive picks up the […]
It’s a practice that may go back as far as 45,000 years. Homo Sapiens (That’s us) may not have been the only humans to do it. It spans cultures, continents and entire eras of human history. This week, we’re talking head shaping, aka Cranial Deformation, aka the Toulouse Deformity, aka Definitely Not Alien Skulls. First, […]
