The Ottoman sultan Ibrahim had all 280 of his concubines thrown into the sea with stones tied to their feet after suspecting that one of them had slept with another man.
During the Middle Ages, people were killed after being accused of witchcraft. Estimates based on anthropological research suggest that more than 600,000 people were killed for witchcraft during this period, including the Salem witch trials.
The Mexican general Santa Anna had a military state funeral held for his leg after it was amputated following a cannon wound.
In China, thousands of babies are abandoned every year because of the state’s one-child policy.
Before the 19th century, dentures were commonly made using teeth taken from dead soldiers.
The Roman emperor Gaius made his beloved horse a senator.
Britons living in the fifth century used the skulls of the dead as drinking cups.
After Pope Gregory IX learned that cats were used in devil worship, cats were slaughtered across Europe. These mass killings were followed by plague epidemics that spread rapidly through rats and caused the deaths of a hundred million people.
The Aztecs sacrificed humans to their gods. Research concerning the temple at Tenochtitlan in 1487 indicated that 20,000 people had been sacrificed there.
The Maya also practised human sacrifice. One of their most common methods was to open the victim’s chest and remove the heart while it was still beating.
In the 13th century, 30,000 young children were recruited into Crusader armies after being persuaded that God would allow them to reclaim the Holy Land peacefully and without difficulty. Most died along the way during the expeditions. Some were sold into slavery.
In ancient Egypt, servants were covered in honey to draw flies away from the pharaoh and towards themselves.
Some pharaohs had their servants, animals and even concubines buried with them in the monumental tombs built after their deaths.
The Romans used human urine as mouthwash.
In 1788, near the Romanian town of Caransebeș, an Austrian army searching for Ottoman forces attacked its own troops in the confusion and panic arising from a dispute between reconnaissance and cavalry units, losing 10,000 soldiers.
Before becoming pope, Pius II wrote an erotic book called “The Tale of Two Lovers.”
In the 19th century, people could often be buried before their deaths had been conclusively established. Inventors designed and patented coffins intended to allow people who were not dead to “send word above.”
Around 750,000 men died during the American Civil War, representing 2.5% of the country’s population.
In the Middle Ages, people believed to be guilty or in the wrong were subjected to an ordeal to prove their innocence. Their arms were forced into a barrel of boiling water. It was believed that if they were innocent, God would protect them and their arms would not burn.
Animals were also frequently put on trial in the Middle Ages and were routinely sentenced to death.
In a practice lasting from around 1909 into the 1970s, the Australian government separated Aboriginal children from their families in the name of assimilation, educating them to reject and deny their Aboriginal identity and culture.
Between 1525 and 1866, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, the Caribbean and South America.
Around the time of European discovery and the years that followed, the Indigenous population of the Americas, estimated at 12 million in the 1500s, had fallen to around 237,000 by the 1900s.
“Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,” a popular children’s medicine in the 19th century, contained a high concentration of morphine.
Margaret Sanger was one of the world’s earliest activists for birth control and women’s right to control their fertility. A nurse herself, she opened her first birth-control clinic in 1916 and was sentenced to a month in prison for disturbing the peace.
In Renaissance Venice, men convicted of rape could choose between six months in prison, paying a fine or marrying the victim.
After having his wife’s lover killed, Peter the Great had the man’s head cut off, placed in a jar and put in his wife’s bedroom.
In 16th-century Canada, women drank a mixture made from dried beaver testicles as a contraceptive.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, wealthy Europeans ate corpses in the belief that doing so would cure their illnesses.
The South African military subjected gay men and lesbians to sex-change procedures in an attempt to eliminate homosexuality from its ranks. Since 1998, homosexuality has had legal protection in South Africa, including within the military.
In ancient Rome, fathers had the legal right to kill a member of their family.After discovering a 36,000-year-old steppe bison preserved in ice in Alaska,R. Dale Guthrie and his team ate some of its meat and said, “It tasted good for its age, but it was still a little tough.”
Pedro López, the rapist and child murderer known as the Monster of the Andes, was convicted in 1983 of killing 110 young girls. In his confession, he said he had killed 300 girls. López was released for good behaviour after spending 20 years in a maximum-security prison in Ecuador.
The Roman emperor Commodus had people with physical or intellectual disabilities, as well as people with dwarfism, rounded up across the country and ordered them to fight one another to the death with axes in the Colosseum.
In and before 1960, cigarette advertisements claimed that smoking had health benefits, even presenting recommendations from doctors and supposedly approved research.
The Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov attempted to impregnate a chimpanzee using human sperm. He called this unsuccessful experiment “humanzee.”
The An Lushan Rebellion against China’s Tang dynasty began in AD 755. It resulted in the deaths of 36 million people, close to one-sixth of the world’s population at the time.
In colonial America, pregnant women were prohibited from taking painkillers during or immediately before childbirth. The ban rested on the belief that the pain of childbirth was a punishment for Eve eating the forbidden fruit.
Iraq’s late dictator Saddam Hussein was presented with the key to the city of Detroit.