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It is quite possible to examine diet through archeological means (composition of bones and teeth). However, I don't know that anybody has done a systematic study of such records with an eye towards looking for vegetarianism. The one piece of similar information I am aware of is that teeth of hunter-gatherers are often discernible at a glance, due to the ...

The one pandemic disease we know of that has a good chance for having an origin in the Americas is syphilis. When it first hit Europe in 1494 it spread rapidly and the mortality rate was very high (as is typical with new diseases that hit an immunologically naieve population). As Jared Diamond describes it, "[W]hen syphilis was first definitely ...

An archaeological evidence I think could be impossible: if they analyze the content of the digestive system like they did with Ötzi,even if they can find some bodies like this preserved under some special conditions, will be evidence for a few days of diet. If they analyze some lack of nutrients in the bones that lack might be also due to some other factors, ...

In the story of the Trojan War, if not necessarily in the text of Homer's Iliad, Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra learns of the fall of Troy via a relay of fire beacons. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, she's said to have received the news in Mycenae (approximately 400 miles away) the very same night that Troy fell, and Aeschylus describes the path of the transmitted ...

You can find the answer to that question in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel. He states that people get infected by their pets and that all great epidemics (variola, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, influenza ...) evolved from animals. Microbes needs a mass of people to spread around so big societies, living in cities and connected with good trading ...

Even in England, where given the size of the country and the number of battles you can't help tripping over them, the site of a few very important ones are missing or wrong. Bosworth field, the end of the War of the Roses is certainly commemorated in the wrong place. The site of Boudica's defeat is unknown.

When I was out west a number of years ago, a friend asserted that the disappearance of the "Anasazi" civilization of native Americans could have occurred for any number of reasons, including disease. Unfortunately, I don't think modern scholarship on the subject agrees with his assertion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasazi Widespread disease generally ...