Author: Adrian Chirila

As anyone who as ever experienced it can tell you, war is a nasty business. And whoever tells you otherwise either hasn’t experienced it firsthand or profits from war in one way or the other. In any case, the tides of war are almost never certain and things can turn around at a moment’s notice.…

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Mapping things is an incredibly useful tool for humanity. By analyzing a given situation or development and then putting the results on a map, scientists and researchers can better understand and predict future trends around the world. And more detailed that map is, the more accurate the predictions are. Now, maps don’t even need to…

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With the almost insane amount of pictures taken on a daily basis around the world these days, it’s quite hard to say that there’s such a thing as a rare one. That same thing certainly doesn’t apply for past photos. But regardless of whether they’re past or present, there are some rare pictures out there…

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The usual candidates for this kind of list would be things like the highest mountain, or the longest river, or the biggest forest, or canyon, or other obvious stuff like that. But you probably already learned those things in school, and we here at TopTenz aren’t about the obvious and instead focus on bringing you…

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Planet Earth is an amazing place, to say the least. And even though we’ve been living on its surface our entire life, there are still a lot of things we don’t know about it. Many things that we do know are awe-inspiring. What’s even more interesting about some of these is the fact that they…

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There’s a stark difference between societies today and those in the past, mostly coming in the form of rituals. Today’s societies, or the “modern age” has very few of them, while in the past rituals were an integral part of everyday life. Rituals, in broad terms, are a form of invitation by the society to come…

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Native American tribes were plentiful and varied, with different cultures and ways of life. Some were more sedentary and with a focus on agriculture, while others were more nomadic, hunting bison and pronghorn antelope on the vast expanses of the Great Plains. But even though they are often seen as noble savages, driven back from…

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With archaeology, we are able to take a peek into the past. Ancient texts, though revealing, often times are subjective, written by conquerors and victors, skewing the facts to make themselves appear in a more positive light. But ancient relics, buried deep in the ground by time or people, tell a more complete story of…

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Made popular by the famous video game series Assassin’s Creed, the Order of Assassins (on which the games are based) has a far darker and more mysterious history than many of the game’s fans would even believe. Few in number and geographically dispersed throughout the Middle East, this holy sect of Islamic extremists from the Middle…

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According to some new research done by the scientists at the University of California, it seems that life on Earth developed some 4.1 billion years ago, almost the instant the planet formed and 300 million years earlier than previously believed. And once it did, life slowly but surely took over the entire planet. As time…

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It’s time for some good, old-fashioned speculation. What would happen if aliens visited earth? Now, the speculation and assumptions we’re about to make are based on logic, philosophy, educated guesses, probabilities, nature, and of course, our own history. After all, our frame of reference is quite limited when it comes to possible encounters with extraterrestrial life.…

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The jungles are, and always have been mysterious. People can and have gone in them, never to be seen again. And even if they make up just 7 percent of the Earth’s land surface, with that number going down year after year, they are home to half of all living creatures on the planet. And…

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Ancient manuscripts, written in some old and forgotten languages, can offer truly insightful glimpses into the distant past. Many such tomes were written hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, and their grammar can still pose a serious impediment to scholars today in understanding them completely. While some are still a complete mystery, others offered…

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Our story begins some 65 million years ago, just after the dinosaurs perished and the age of mammals began. Hurtling at each other at a “whooping”, one inch per year, the Americas were still separated by a marine connection between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Before they eventually came together, these continents were completely isolated…

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Who were Attila and his Huns? Well, as Europe was slowly transitioning from the Classical Era to more medieval times, the Roman Empire was witnessing its last years as a dominant force on the continent. Well, the western half, at least. In the east, the Byzantine Empire would endure up until the 15th century. In…

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Even if piracy may not be the oldest profession in the world, it certainly was among the first. Eighteenth and nineteenth century piracy in and around the Caribbean has been heavily romanticized in various novels and movies over the past century, but the actual act has been around for a very long time – probably…

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Like many of the other living beings on Earth, we rely on our senses to function in the world. And even though we humans have the five major senses, there could be as many as 21. Nevertheless, the sense of sound is one of the major ones, and it helps us pick up on vibrations…

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Sparta is one of the most extreme civilizations in Earth’s history. Relatively early in Greek history, even before the Classical World had begun, the Spartans drove through a radical social and political revolution. In effect, all Spartans are made to be equal. Really equal. And they developed key concepts we still use today, like the…

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