History with Kayleigh

16/01/2026

The gorgeous Queen's View overlooking Loch Tummel at Pitlochry, in Perthshire Scotland. July 2023.

This was my favorite spot to see the beautiful highlands of Scotland.

10/01/2026

Approximately 7200 years ago a teenage hunter-gatherer girl passed away and was laid to rest in the Leang Panninge cave. Her remains were discovered in 2015 but research has been conducted only recently on her DNA.

No one could have known that she was from an unknown distinct human lineage that has never been found anywhere else in the world. Her remains carried the first ancient human DNA of the island region between Asia and Australia, better known as Wallacea, which is an incredible unique find as it was previously thought that inhabitants arrived in Wallacea some 3500 years ago.

This discovery is telling us the story of a previously unknown group of humans and is giving us new insight into the population history and genetic diversity of early modern humans in this part of the world that’s not yet well understood. This latest discovery shows evidence of a previously unknown distinct group of modern human living in the area already as the new farmers came into Indonesia.

The reason they were unknown is because there are barely any archaeological sites from their culture and ancient skeletal remains are almost never found. This group of modern humans that lived in the area has gone completely extinct as there are no descendants of this lineage alive in modern times. Another amazing discovery made by the DNA research was that she carried yet another fascinating piece within her lineage, she carried the genome of Denisovans.

This showed that Denisovans lived in a far larger area than was previously thought as most Denisovan remains are found in Siberia and Tiber. But even this part is not without a little bit of mystery.

Her DNA has been compared to the DNA of other hunter-gatherers who lived in Sulawesi around the same time and the other hunter gatherers did not carry any traces of Denisovan DNA.

So not only was this girl a descendant from a previously unknown group of humans that went extinct but on top of that she carried Denisovan DNA within her that other cultures living in the area at the same time do not carry.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

09/01/2026

Before the Kerma Culture emerged in the Bronze Age there was the Pre-Kerma Culture between 3700 and 3250 BCE, and the way for them to lay the dead to rest was in a Speos, a Speos is a Temple or Tomb cut into a rock facade.

What we lack in knowledge about the Classic Kerma Culture they made up for in their burial practices, as archaeologists have discovered so many burials we have quite a clear picture of this part of their culture.

The oldest known burials in the Nubian lands were Mounds, this to me personally isn’t that strange as most cultures evolve into burial practices with mounds structures, and then there’s the Mastaba’s from Egypt, but I personally see Mastaba's as a form of a burial mound as well, just unique and not round.

You can see an example of a Kerman Tumulus on screen, they were in my opinion very intricate and I love the dedication to layout each slab of black sandstone to create the concentric circles, while pebbles of white quarts supported the structure.

The largest graves were surrounded by smaller ones, this suggests a relationship between the people buried here.

The largest burial mounds are up to 90 meters in diameter and they are located along the southern boundary of the cemetery.

It’s hypothesized that these 4 largest mounds were the graves of Kerma’s last Kings.
There had been some burial mounds created in the El-Kurru cemetery, they ranged from 7 meters in diameter to 8.5 meters in diameter.

One of the burial mounds known as Tumulus Ku 6 shows the development of the burial mounds and how their complexity increased over the centuries.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

09/01/2026

Luke has a problem with the way people view the builders of Gobekli Tepe.
Referring to them as "Simple Hunter-Gatherers" is a disservice & oversimplification of the obviously deeply complex & sophisticated society responsible for the Tas Tepeler world.
In today's video he has a conversation with Kayleigh (History with Kayleigh) who has traveled extensively throughout the Tas Tepeler realm & dedicated quite a lot of time to understanding it.

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09/01/2026

Many people think that the calendar that we use today stems from ancient Rome, which the current version that we use, known as the Gregorian calendar does, but the basics of it were already invented and used in ancient Egypt for a few thousand years.

The first calendar used by the Ancient Egyptians was a Lunar based calendar in combination with the seasonal appearance of the Star Sirius, this corresponded closely to the true solar year, although it was 12 minutes shorter.

Eventually over the centuries difficulties arose because the solar and lunar year are quite incompatible, so they invented a schematic civil year to fix their issue.

The calendar that eventually was used in ancient Egypt is known as the civil calendar which is seen as a LuniSolar Calendar, meaning it was based on the observation of the lunar cycle in relation to the solar year.

This Calendar has been known to have been in use as early as the Reign of Pharaoh Djer during the 1st Dynasty around 3000 BCE.

Yearly records were being kept about the annual Nile river flood’s high-water mark in combination with the astrological knowledge that was in use as early as 5000 BCE at the Nabta Playa stone circles.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

09/01/2026

How did the ancient inhabitants of the hot Iranian desert keep themselves cool during the intensely hot summers where even being in the shade is very unpleasant?

Well, besides the windcatchers they had in their homes of course, since we spoke about them a while ago.

Think about being in the middle of a hot dry desert, it would be a blessing to be able to drink cold beverages and eat ice cream in the middle of summer to cool off, or to keep your meat, dairy, fruits and other foods fresh for longer periods of time by cooling them.

But I am hearing you asking yourselves.. ice?? how on earth would they be able to provide ice in the middle of a hot and dry desert?

The answer to that is simple yet innovative; build a Yakhchal.

We don’t know for certain where the first ice houses were built on the planet, and we aren’t sure about when the first yakhchal was built either but we do know that around 400 BCE the Persian engineers were already mastering the art of storing ice in the middle of the desert, it was already a widespread phenomenon around this time.

This shows that the actual invention of the Yakhchal happened much earlier as you don’t master something by doing it for a short amount of time, but it’s unfortunately unclear for how long.

The practice of storing ice itself was already long established by the time of 400 BCE, we know for a fact that the Mongols were already storing ice for quite some time, although again it’s unclear for how long, but there are accounts of them doing it before 400 BCE.

Ice was mentioned in older texts in Iran from before 400 BCE, but there was no mention of how it was produced, which doesn’t allow scholars to interpret that as yakhchals already being used for very long before 400 BCE, although it is of course hypothesized as I said earlier, you don’t master something by doing it for a short amount of time.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

08/01/2026

When was the first alcoholic beverage made? Which beverages were made in ancient times by the different civilizations?

What I quickly found out is that we humans have been making and drinking alcohol for a much much longer period of time that I had thought before looking into it.

Before we start, I would like to note that as most, if not all, of you watching know; animals have been eating fermented fruits long before humans started doing the same.

The oldest intentionally fermented beverages may have existed as early as 13,000 BCE during the late Mesolithic / early neolithic era.

In Haifa, modern day Israel, the oldest verifiable brewery was discovered in a prehistoric burial cave.

There were stone mortars found carved into the cave floor where the traces of a wheat and barley based alcohol was discovered.

The researchers have hypothesized that the alcoholic drinks would have most likely been used for ritual feasts honouring the dead.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

08/01/2026

We’ve all suspected that humans arrived in the Americas much earlier than was long thought by the researchers and historians.

The ancient footprints scattered along the dried up lakebed of Lake Otero at White Sands in New Mexico have been confirmed by scientists to have been dated as the earliest known footprints in North America.

This conformation pushes back the timeline of humans arriving in North America that was believed to have happened around 13,000 years ago by at least 10,000 years to the humans arriving by at least 23,000 years ago.

Some footprints found here might even be 30,000 years old which would push the timeline back some 20,000 years, although this is not yet confirmed.

For a long time there was a large lake known as Lake Otero in New Mexico, the climate was more wet and the area was covered in vegetation, grasslands stretching for miles.

This lush green area became the primary hunting grounds for fearsome predators like dire wolves and the American lion, they preyed on the plant eaters that grazed in the area of the Tularosa Basin.

When the last ice age ended around 12.000 years ago the lake started to evaporate, rain and snow melt carried dissolved gypsum from the mountain ranges surrounding the lake into the basin.

The question one can ask is; how long have humans been living in the Tularosa Basin? And this latest discovered confirmation shows that humans have been inhabiting the area during the ice age’s megafauna for a lot longer than we previously thought.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

08/01/2026

There’s actually only one MAJOR difference between the Windtraps in Dune and the Windcatchers from Yazd, so we’re going to look into that right now.

The windtraps were used on the Planet of Arrakis in the world of Dune, they were mostly used by the Fremen, the Fremen are the human inhabitants of the planet Arrakis, who mainly live in the desert.

The windtraps on Arrakis in Dune don’t function the same as the Windcatchers from Yazd, they don’t use the same cooling technique and aren’t built to have the wind blowing through them cool down the interior of a building.

The Windtraps from Dune mostly work at night when the air has cooled down and condensation occurs, the moisture would be carried by the winds, when the wind hits the windtraps the wind with moisture will be caught and funnelled down to collect the water particles in large catch basins for the Fremen to use.

The catch basins are large underground facilities for the storage of the water that’s been collected through the use of windtraps and deathstills.

A deathstill was a place where the Fremen were able to collect the water from a dead person’s body, as water was the most precious material on the planet Arrakis.

The Fremen would even go as far as to actually kill their wounded enemies so they could collect the water from their bodies at deathstills.

Music by Adrian von Ziegler

07/01/2026

Of course you can understand we won’t be able to know everything the ancient Egyptians used to eat, nor will we know how many meals they ate in a day.

What we do know is what some of their absolute favorite foods were because these foods were loved enough to be documented and prepared for the deceased to take with them in the afterlife.

Remains of these foods and drinks were found in tombs including the abundance of items for food preparations which were left for the servants of the deceased to prepare them food in the afterlife to enjoy.

Of course beyond just the remains of foods there were the many depictions of foods, the preparation of foods and drinks on the tomb walls, some scenes are just incredible in depicting the amazing meals the deceased would be eating in the afterlife.

Of course there is an important disclaimer from Dr. Menhat-Allah El Dorry, an archaeologist and archaeobotanist who specialises in the history of food; “despite the wealth of sources on what ancient Egyptians ate, like for instance the depicted scenes on walls of tombs and funerary offerings that were discovered in tombs, there are no full recipes. At least not in the modern sense."

Music by Adrian von Ziegler