Black Death Study Shows Europeans Lived Longer After 14th Century Pandemic. The Black Death, a plague that first devastated Europe in the 1300s, had a silver lining. After the ravages of the disease, surviving Europeans lived longer, a new study finds. An analysis of bones in London cemeteries from before and after the plague reveals that people had a lower risk of dying at any age after the first plague outbreak compared with before.
In the centuries before the Black Death, about 10 percent of people lived past age 70, said study researcher Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. In the centuries after, more than 20 percent of people lived past that age. "It is definitely a signal of something very important happening with survivorship," DeWitte told Live Science. [Images: 14th-Century Black Death Graves] The plague years The Black Death, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, first exploded in Europe between 1347 and 1351. Scientists long believed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately. Post-plague comeback.
What medieval Europe did with its teenagers. Image copyright Getty Images Today, there's often a perception that Asian children are given a hard time by their parents. But a few hundred years ago northern Europe took a particularly harsh line, sending children away to live and work in someone else's home. Not surprisingly, the children didn't always like it.
Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels. He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home "till the age of seven or nine at the utmost" but then "put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years". It was for the children's own good, he was told - but he suspected the English preferred having other people's children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder. So why did this seemingly cruel system evolve? 'Charlemagne's Bones' Are Likely Authentic, Scientists Say (PHOTOS) The map that saved the London Underground. 9 January 2014Last updated at 20:10 ET By Emma Jane Kirby BBC News Continue reading the main story You must have JavaScript enabled to view this content.
A zoomable version of this map is available on the desktop site Explore the 1914 Wonderground Underground map Europe was about to tear itself apart, but Londoners in 1914 were more preoccupied with the overcrowding on the Tube and a profanity uttered in a new West End play. Just outside St Paul's, the Tube train hiccoughs twice, then stops. The bearded man in painter's overalls squashed beside me asks rhetorically why we should pay such ludicrous ticket prices for such a geriatric transport network? Suddenly, there's a bellow of laughter and the bearded man points at the priority seat for the elderly and disabled. "Priority seat for persons with gonorrhoea and genital herpes," it reads. A raucous cheer breaks out and a round of applause. Liverpool Street Station - a less inviting place in 1914 Continue reading the main story Find out more.
Dancing over the edge: Vienna in 1914. 5 January 2014Last updated at 19:48 ET By Bethany Bell BBC News Vienna hosted a rich intellectual and artistic life at the beginning of the 20th Century One hundred years ago, Vienna was at the epicentre of a world on the brink of war. Bethany Bell reflects on a century of changes in the Austrian capital. On my first visit to Vienna in the early 1990s, I wanted, most of all, to see the paintings by Gustav Klimt. I didn't know much about them. My studies in England hadn't exposed me to the art of fin-de-siecle Vienna. The picture conjured up a vanished world of lavish beauty and daring experimentation that was both unfamiliar and exciting. And so, once in Vienna, I went straight to see the collection at the Belvedere museum, a baroque palace on a hill, which, I was interested to discover, had been the home of the ill-fated Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 sparked the First World War.
The Klimts didn't disappoint. Continue reading the main story.