Despite their aggressive nature, the Vikings were also tender and caring beings who cared much about their looks. They groomed themselves a lot; archaeological sites have taught us that they carried combs made of animal horns, especially deer antlers. They also used to bleach their hair and beards blonde and took frequent baths. There is a popular misconception that the Vikings belonged to a particular race or tribe. This could not be further from the truth....

But occasionally, thankfully, this isn’t always the end of the story. While it is rare, sometimes new leads, new ideas, and new breakthroughs motivate authorities to exhume the body of someone who had been written off simply as accidental death or an unsolved murder, only for the results of the post-exhumation investigation to bring about a conviction. Here are ten such cases where bodies were exhumed, leading to the solving of a murder case....

10 Thomas Kottur, Jose Puthurukkayil, And Sister Sephy On March 27, 1992, Sister Abhaya awoke at 4:00 AM to begin her studies at the St. Pius X convent in Kottayam, India. Before starting for the day, the 19-year-old Knanaya Catholic nun went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. The next person to come to the kitchen found the refrigerator door open. There was a bottle of spilled water, there was a slipper under the fridge, and Sister Abhaya was missing....

10The Lusitania The whole of this article could be over misconceptions and arguments about the origins of the First World War, but then it would be several thousand pages long. Seriously, the controversies over who or what caused the war have spilled more ink than the actual war spilled blood. Fortunately, for this article, there is a rather simple (relative to Europe’s story, of course) misconception about the origin of America’s entry into the conflict: the Lusitania....

10 Cult Origins Today, we think of the worship of Mithras as “Mithraism,” but that’s a fairly recent title. Older references to the religion call it either the Mysteries of Mithras or even the Mysteries of the Persians, making the connection between the god and his Persian origins clear. The cult had a major stronghold in the Roman empire, and those Roman subjects who practiced it considered themselves Persian in a cultural respect....

10 The Yellow Fever Epidemic Of 1795–1805 Yellow fever is a tropical disease caused by a virus spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Occasionally, it shows up in higher latitudes. One devastating appearance in Philadelphia in 1793 soon spread to New York City and the entire Eastern seaboard. Though no one at the time understood what caused the disease or how it was spread, the initial reaction to quarantine boats coming from Philadelphia delayed the epidemic for a while....

10 Harry Harlow Professor Harry F. Harlow (1905–1981) was a primatologist and psychologist who garnered international infamy for his developmental studies on infant monkeys. Although his research was scientifically sound, it was undertaken with bizarre methodologies that involved incredibly offensive terminology. After separating baby rhesus macaques from their mothers, Harlow raised the babies in captivity with mechanical surrogate mothers that could dispense milk. He proved that tactile stimulation and cuddling were essential for normal development by comparing the behaviors of monkeys “raised” by cuddly cloth doll mothers against those whose mothers were constructed of cold, hard wire....

10 Paul McCartney A total of 129 songs that McCarthy has written or co-written, including 32 songs with the Beatles, 21 with Wings, and 36 as a soloist or part of a duo/group, have charted on the UK Official Singles Chart since its inception in 1952. The most recent, in collaboration with Kanye West and Rihanna, made it to No. 18 on the charts in 2015. Of his songs, 33 have reached No....

10 Vought F7U Cutlass Before being acquired by Northrop Grumman, Vought produced some of the United States Navy’s best-known and most successful fighters. During World War II, Vought designed the F4U Corsair, which saw service in the Pacific theater, and during Vietnam, naval aviators used Vought’s F-8 Crusader. In between, Vought produced a variety of unusual aircraft, chief among these being the F7U Cutlass. Designed to modernize the US Navy, the F7U ended up being a dangerous and unreliable airplane, ending the lives of many pilots through crashes and accidents....

There is a party atmosphere to this week’s list, as we have stories on LSD, cannabis, New Coke, and ancient beer. Speaking of ancient, we also find out how scientists recovered the oldest Scandinavian DNA from a piece of very old chewing gum. In the animal world, we learn just how involved bonobo mothers are in their sons’ sex lives, and we also read about firemen who had to fight a blaze inside a house filled with hundreds of snakes....

Materials and technology have come a long way since ancient times, and the sports balls in use today reflect these changes. Compared to what we have now, the original balls used in sports are apt to strike us as nothing less than bizarre. Read on to see your favorite sports in a whole different light. 10 Baseball The baseball owes its origins to the efforts of a variety of enterprising individuals, including shoemakers, or cobblers, who made the balls from pieces of rubber shoes....

10 The Deportation Of The Acadians Canada is generally thought of as America’s friendlier northern neighbor, but they’ve been responsible for some pretty horrible things, too. Watch this video on YouTube In 1604, the Acadians helped with the founding of Port Royal, settling in their own colony. They allied themselves with the local Mi’kmaq, and even though they were French settlers, they were mostly independent from their ancestral home. By the 1730s, tensions were increasing between Britain and France, and when both countries started trying to increase their foothold in the area, the Acadians were seen more and more as a loose cannon when it came to allegiance....

Being honored once doesn’t mean the rest of your life will live up to your one great accomplishment. Even if it does, times can change, politics can shift, and one person’s bias can mean the recognition you once enjoyed can be stripped away in a heartbeat. 10 The General Who Wanted To Be Flogged By Little Boys General Eyre Coote had an illustrious military career, for a time. He joined the British royal military at age 14 and was first deployed in America, where he fought on the British side during the Revolutionary War....

Johnson was a plantation-owner who almost single-handedly introduced slavery to the Colony of Virginia; all while running his very own Candyland. Oh, and did I mention he was black? Not only was Johnson African through-and-through, he was an ex-slave himself. In 1621 he’d been snatched by slave traders and wound up working as an ‘indentured servant’ in Virginia. Now, while ‘indentured servants’ were basically slaves there was one important difference: when their contract expired or was bought out, they were free....

SEE ALSO: 10 Heartbreaking Backstories Of Famous Sideshow Freaks Rudy Santos, a 69 year old from the Philippines, suffers from the ultra rare condition known as Craniopagus parasiticus or parasitic twin. He is the oldest person with this condition. Attached to Rudy’s pelvis and abdomen are an extra pair of arms and a leg, which developed when his twin was absorbed into his body during pregnancy. Also connected to his body are an extra pair of nipples and an undeveloped head with an ear and hair....

10Channel IslandsIsland Of The Blue Dolphins Scott O’Dell won the Newbery Medal for children’s literature for his 1960 novel, The Island of the Blue Dolphins. The novel is about a girl named Karana who is left behind on a remote island off the California coast after her family and the rest of her tribe move to the mainland. She lives for years in near-total isolation, taming a wild dog to serve as her protector, building a house of whale bones, and sewing dresses made of cormorant feathers....

Though it should be noted that Lucas personally didn’t write all the Star Wars novels, comics, games, tie-in TV shows, and so on, they’re all considered canon. The planets and moons mentioned in the list below all appear in at least one of the current six Star Wars films and are thus Lucas’s creations, though the finer details may have been fleshed out by someone else. Either way, it’s really quite stunning that fictional planets, containing extreme ecosystems or unfathomable features, could exist in a solar system far, far away....

10Africa’s Central Lake The insane vision of the future of German engineer Herman Sorgel has been covered on Listverse before, but his lofty macro-engineering goals didn’t stop at Atlantropa in 1928. No, the crazy uncle of human engineering just couldn’t resist coming up with outlandish schemes. Taking a look south of the Mediterranean, Sorgel devised a plan that would help sell his Atlantropa ambitions but was also equally ambitious in its own right....

10‘Coventry Carol’ The “Coventry Carol” proves that not all Christmas songs have a cute origin story. This carol dates all the way back to pre-modern England, when villagers still performed “mystery plays,” or reenactments of popular Bible stories. Some of the most prevalent included the Fall of Man, the Building of the Ark, and, of course, the Nativity. The “Coventry Carol” is from a play that occurs soon after the birth of Christ, in the city of Bethlehem....

Date: May 24, 2001 Casualties: 23 People The Versailles wedding hall was a structure located in southeast Jerusalem. On the night of May 24, 2001, Keren and Asaf Dror were celebrating their wedding reception at the location. Hundreds of friends and relatives were in attendance and the party was in full swing when a large portion of the third floor collapsed. As a result of the failure, 23 people fell to their death and 380 were injured....