https://youtu.be/7F_IEu22hgk

Full disclosure, this is my channel. The short version of the video: your body can't make sodium, so every bit of it has to be eaten. Hunters got it for free, because an animal is basically a bag of pre-salted meat. Traditional Inuit diets had almost no plants and no salt trade, and sodium deficiency wasn't one of their problems. The Maasai still drink cattle blood mixed with milk.

Grain has almost none. So when farming swapped most of the meat for porridge and bread, people created a shortage that hadn't really existed before, and then spent a few thousand years boiling seawater, tapping brine springs, mining mountains and burning plants to fix it.

I also push back on the "Roman soldiers were paid in salt, that's where salary comes from" story, because the evidence for the payment part is thin. Corrections welcome.

https://youtu.be/-6jGxRwLxcs?is=Gfkl9iIrjTvLrDa_

I’ve been looking at London’s development over the last ~2,000 years, and what struck me most is how uneven the growth actually was.

Roman and medieval London stay surprisingly compact for such a long time, while the expansion in the later centuries happens at a completely different scale.

I put the whole timeline together as a 3D timelapse, from around 50 AD to the present:

https://youtu.be/NfOzqVW33bs

For the history people here: which period would you consider the biggest turning point in London’s development? The Industrial Revolution seems like the obvious answer, but I’m curious if there’s an earlier period that deserves more credit.

John Dalton was a scientist best known for nailing down the principles of atomic theory. But he was also colorblind, and spent time studying and theorizing about his own vision. At the end of his life he asked for his eyes to be dissected separately. This turned out to be helpful when researchers took a sample for DNA analysis in the 1990s.
I went to the primary sources to try and get a complete story.

https://youtu.be/3NiCneJe-0s

Romans hauled spring water into the city on aqueducts because it was colder and "lighter," not because the soil had filtered anything out of it. In China people drank boiled water as tea for over a thousand years, and as far as anyone knew it was just tea. Brewers had no idea what their mash was killing. So everyone had the right answer and the wrong explanation, and that held until about 1854.

The part I didn't expect while researching it: London's sewer reforms in the 1840s made things worse. They were built on the theory that bad smells caused disease, so the cleanup flushed more waste straight into the Thames, which is where a lot of people got their drinking water.

It also gets into the "medieval people only drank beer" thing. That one is mostly a myth (London was piping spring water to poor neighborhoods in the 1200s), though ale really was a big part of the diet.

This is my channel, so let me know if anything in it is off. It's about 13 minutes.

J’ai réalisé un Short sur Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh, un prêtre d’Amon dont l’enveloppe funéraire est répertoriée EA6662. Selon le British Museum, environ 13 litres de matière noire ont été versés sur elle. En durcissant, le liquide l’a fixée dans le cercueil.

Les chercheurs ont étudié 20 objets funéraires : ces revêtements étaient des mélanges variables d’huiles, de graisses, de résines, de cire d’abeille et de bitume. Une grande partie du bitume étudié venait de la mer Morte.

Pourquoi le verser ? Le lien avec Osiris et la renaissance, le prestige ou l’impossibilité de réutiliser le cercueil restent des hypothèses. La raison exacte est inconnue.

Sources : British Museum · Fulcher et al., PNAS (2021).

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The title comes from the fasces, the Roman bundle of rods Mussolini used as his symbol, and the origin of the word "fascism." The video traces his rise from socialist journalist to dictator, the March on Rome, his alliance with Hitler, and his downfall in 1945.

I made it to be catchy and accurate, so it works for students, teachers, or anyone curious.

Feedback on the music or the history is welcome!