Pompeii's famous casts date back to an idea Giuseppe Fiorelli had in 1863: pouring plaster into the hollows left by bodies in the volcanic deposits. Ever since, family ties had been assigned to the victims based on their poses. In 2024, a DNA study published in Current Biology upended those stories: the adult holding a child on their lap, long described as its mother, was in fact an unrelated man.
Around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, became high priestess of the Moon god at Ur. She composed hymns to the goddess Inanna and put her name to them. She is the oldest person identified as the author of a literary work, about 1,500 years before Homer.
Squeeze Earth's 4.5 billion years into a single 24-hour day. Homo sapiens shows up around 11:59:54 p.m., roughly six seconds before midnight. All of written history, from Sumerian tablets to today, fits into the final tenth of a second. A cosmic blink.