Heritage

Are you a boxers or Y-fronts person? Thongs or bikinis? Sports bra or lace? Today, there’s a vast array of colours, shapes and fabrics on offer when it comes to underwear – particularly that of women.

One of the most famous stage directions in theatre is found in The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Bears – besides Paddington and Winnie-the-Pooh – are extinct in Britain, but Shakespeare’s audiences 400 years ago would have been entirely familiar with the animal. And thespians of old playing the Globe Theatre would have walked past the bear-baiting ring on their way in.

The items, which were found at the wreck of a 17th-century ship in the Wadden Sea near Texel, include a very luxurious gown that has remained remarkably well preserved. This gown serves as the showpiece of the temporary exhibition ‘Garde Robe’, which opened at museum Kaap Skil today.

Contemporary chroniclers wrote about a "mystery cloud" which dimmed the light of the sun above the Mediterranean in the years 536 and 537 CE. Tree rings testify poor growing conditions over the whole Northern Hemisphere - the years from 536 CE onward seem to have been overshadowed by an unusual natural phenomenon.

Historical reconstruction of Corfe Castle in Dorset, United Kingdom. Part of a final year project for Computer Animation at the University of Portsmouth by Ciprian Selegean.

The question of whether warfare is encoded in our genes, or appeared as a result of civilisation, has long fascinated anyone trying to get to grips with human society.

Thirty-eight hundred years ago, on the hot river plains of what is now southern Iraq, a Babylonian student did a bit of schoolwork that changed our understanding of ancient mathematics.

Fire, a tool broadly used for cooking, constructing, hunting and even communicating, was arguably one of the earliest discoveries in human history. But when, how and why it came to be used is hotly debated among scientists.

Scholars have long debated how much of the Hebrew bible was composed before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE.

Gone are the days when archaeology was just a whole load of sand, dust and bones. These days the real explorers are all about the robotics.

Use the interactive map to find out where the Vikings travelled to and how they traded and plundered in everything from spices to slaves.

A new Shakespeare First Folio has been discovered at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, has authenticated the First Folio as genuine, bringing the total of First Folios known to survive to 234.

The U-Boat was confiscated at the end of the Great War and was taken up the River Medway along with 25 other U-Boats to be scrapped on the Kent Coast in 1921.

From The Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter, Macbeth to Bewitched, witches have long been a part of popular culture. Witches are now regularly presented as cuddly feminists, but Robert Eggers’s new film The Witch: A New England Folktale vividly reminds us of the horrors lurking behind the fantasy.

A new research project at the University of Cambridge is set to shed light on the history of writing, revealing connections to our modern alphabet that cross cultures and go back thousands of years.