Word: caving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tank cars filled with 45,000 gallons of arsenic trichloride stood on a railroad siding in the town of Horse Cave, Ky. (pop. 2,000) last week, slowly dripping one of the deadliest of poisons. Four years ago the oily, yellowish liquid was bought as surplus from the Army's Chemical Corps (which had used it during World War II to make lethal Lewisite gas) by a company which planned to use one of its derivatives in drilling oil wells. Later the company went out of business, leaving the cargo unclaimed...
...find fragments of pottery, stone implements and bone, which he showed to the schoolteacher in the village of Tiefenellern. The relics eventually got to Dr. Otto Kunkel, curator of the prehistoric department of the Bavarian National Museum. Dr. Kunkel suspected their importance and encouraged a thorough exploration of the cave where the red mouse beckoned...
Enthusiastic members of Bamberg's Prehistoric -Society, led by Dr. Bruno Miiller, did the actual digging. Six feet below the modern floor of the cave, they found a jumbled mass of human bones. Sorted-out and carefully studied, the bones proved to be the remains of not three but 40 young women, none of them more than 20 years old. They may or may not have been virgins, says Dr. Kunkel. but "the skulls and bones are of such fine structure and regular proportions that they must have belonged to girls who, even today, would be considered beautiful...
Worse than Death. It was not necessarily the girls' beauty that brought their bones to rest in the Cave of the Virgins' Hollow. Among their remains the diggers found fragments of many small pottery bowls. When they also found an enormous pottery cauldron three feet in diameter, they began to suspect that the 40 beauties had met a fate in the cave that was really worse than death. Further study of the skeletons confirmed the suspicion. Each shapely skull had a hole in it, and conical stone axheads found in the debris fitted the holes exactly. Most...
...Reconstructing the goings-on, in the cave, the diggers concluded that it was a kind of restaurant. The pottery proved that its patrons were "Danube Culture People," a crude neolithic type that flourished in Central Europe some 5,000 years ago. But the bones of the 40 young girls. were much finer and more delicate. Dr. Kunkel suspects that they belonged to a different race,whose settlements were raided periodically for edible young women...