Culture-History

If there are !=norsemen, they are going to be more impressed by epic poems than feats of strength).

>Norse Shamans who did not convert to Christianity were tied to posts on the shore, and drowned in the rising tide
>Finnish Guerillas during the winter war would sometimes slay a Russian sentry quietly, leave him sitting in his place, and then pour water around his feet so that his friends would have to pry the corpse out of the ice.

Because of the lack of wheels or horses, the Inca made a trade empire out of footrunners who moved goods from city to city through mountain-roads. Those that were rich and prosperous could afford to give all of their traders good footwear, while those that were unsuccessful had to let theirs go barefoot. Thus the Inca made a habit of taunting those with callouses on their feet and that weren't warriors as being poor and destitute.

The Middle-East has traditionally been the technological center of the world, only really lagging once World War 1 came around. There are unconfirmed stories of a scientist in 1500's Istanbul succeeding in recreating Archimedes' brass mechanical people. Thus, in my world the desert-dwelling people are also on the forefront of science, having sand-skiffs and blunderbusses in an otherwise-Feudal world.

One tribe in Africa believed that the first pair of brothers once found an egg, which one of them ate. That brother became the first snake, who crafted his brother a mate to begin their people. According to the culture, then, the brothers' still watch out for each other; the snake-brother told his children to let out a loud sound, so as not to accidentally harm their man-kin. Hence, rattlesnakes.

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The Sumerians believed that the afterlife was, basically, empty. Pools of water, bare clay ground, and darkness.

Later, the Egyptians thought that it was vitally important to send dead people off to the afterlife with some supplies. At the very least, some food and tradeable goods, preferably some livestock and seed. Rich people and Pharaohs were sent off with, basically, enough people and goods to found a colony and build a city.

Later, the Greeks believed that much of the netherworld was gloomy and empty, like the Sumerians, but that there were areas that were pleasant and fertile (the elysian fields) and some cities (Tartarus.)

They all agreed that it's underground, and you have to cross a river and get past a monster.

Sounds a lot like they're all talking about the same place, and the gradual influx of people and steady colonization efforts are bearing fruit.

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giant tortoises didn't get their latin name for more than 2 centuries after discovery because they were too delicious. Thir meat was described as " far more delicious than chicken, pork or beef'." And "succulent meat and the oil from their bodies as pure as butter, but best of all, the giants could hibernate in a ship’s damp for a year or more.", which caused no specimen to arrive to Europe until mid to late 19th century.

Also, chainsaw was first invented as an instrument to help at childbirth.
I've got loads more seeing as I watch QI all the time

In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb bought his wife Stonehenge. She didn’t like it, so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.

    Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.

There is a tribe in the Phillipines that believe babies are literally made from menstrual blood and semen.
So if two guys have sex with the same woman and she has a baby, they are BOTH the father because they both 'contributed'

    I've heard Russians have a thing about smiling around people who aren't family or close friends. They apparently view it as a sign of a person being either foolish or disingenuous.

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One thing that really fascinates me about the Aztecs is how they were seemingly really alien even to everybody else in the region. The other peoples could relate in some fashion, but the Aztecs were still different enough to inspire feelings of surprise, dread and hate. I'll just repost this next paragraph from foolz.

The Meshika were sort of a bunch of mercenaries and semi-nomadic tribes in the really olden days. Then some Mesoamerican king figured that he was gonna marry off his daughter to the leader of the Meshika, and did so with all the pomp and tradition that goes into a royal wedding. During the Meshika's celebration, the marriage comes to an end when the bride is skinned and has her heart carved out from her chest. Because that's just one of those traditions the Meshika felt really strongly about. The king gets pissed and exiles the Meshika to a nasty swamp where they're expected to die off. Instead they build a fucking city, Tenochtitlan, in the fucking swamp. And over the next few centuries the hardcore fundamentalist warrior people would become the dominant power in Mesoamerica. They were hated by more or less everyone who wasn't okay with blood sacrifices of thousands of people on a daily basis, and as it turned out, most guys who weren't Meshika were not okay with thousands of people being ritually sacrificed on a daily basis.

Not sure if it's a further detail of that same story or just another situation entirely (since it was clearly an established thing that surely happened more than once), but I've read a similar account where a local non-Aztec ruler attempted to marry his daughter into their society. The high point of the reception was when one of the Aztec priests came out wearing her skin like a full-body suit and did some ritual dance in front of her horrified father. It was intended as a great honor for both the girl and her father.

The Aztecs are interesting. They were actually really advanced in some ways, like public education, cool agriculture, clever architecture and a surprisingly urbanized population. And at the same time they would send tens of thousands of people a day to be sacrificed, their priests dancing around in the flayed skin of the people whose beating hearts they'd carved out. And people would be okay with it because they thought it kept the world from ending.

The Macuahuitl was not a weapon intended to kill people, but to wound them. When the brittle obsidian blades flaked and broke on impact, it would cause tiny grains of obsidian to become imbedded in the wound. Thus, the wound would never properly heal; every time you moved, the obsidian flakes would tear at the surrounding flesh, causing pain and preventing proper healing. This is entirely in line with the Aztec motivation for waging war, which was to capture prisoners to be sacrificed. As an exceptionally painful but not exceptionally lethal weapon, the macuahuitl excelled at this. Of course, the blades would become useless after a few hits, but the weapon could still be used as a normal club.

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    The Scythians were notorious for their use of poison arrows. They even had multiple types of poison, some for hunting, others for war (the ones for war were much, much slower and often involved filling a jar with snake venom and poop and leaving it underground), and would distinguish them by painting the arrow shafts in diamond patterns, like those found on venomous snakes.
    Very few people fucked with the Scythians because they knew that even being nicked by an arrow probably meant a slow, horrible, gangrenous death.

Consider the various barbarian tribes near the end of the Roman Empire, then. They had an ingenious idea when it came to overrunning small border-towns of the empire: release various small animals into their general direction, then release hungry and flaming predator animals like foxes and boars. The town couldn't fight both the fires and the raiders, and when all was done they gathered the cooked meat.

The iron age Greeks thought that Greece was originally inhabited by a civilization of massive cyclopes who built all the Minoan and Mycenaean palaces. The fact that elephant skulls were found frequently throughout Greece furthered this theory.

    Zoroastrian Persians had specially designated areas for their dead to be eaten by carrion. It was a very big no-no to use cremation because fire was sacred.
    Additionally they had a strong emphasis on the importance of truth and the evil of lies. I always found this amusing, what with their rivals being the Greeks who are well known to be huge liars.

Well, the Basque language has been developing independently of literally everything else for thousands of years.
It's worse than Gaelic in that regard; at least Gaelic has some Latin influences from the hilariously failed invasion of Northern England.

Fun fact: Phoenicians developed the alphabet as a way to record transactions in the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. Their most valued and treasured trade good was a rich purple dye made from the ink of a shellfish found outside Phoenicia. IIRC, they drove the shellfish into extinction from overfishing. We'll never know what shade of purple made the Phoenicians so wealthy.

    some japanese bhuddist monks practiced Sokushinbutsu, the process of mummifying yourself, they would eat a special diet for three years with an exercise regimine to strip all the fat from their body. then for another three years they would drink tea containing the same oil found in poison ivy to make their body toxic to maggots ant the like. finally they would lock themselves in a stone tomb barly large enough to fit in and starve to death when the other monks knew they were dead they would seal up the toumb for some amount of time. if they had succeded in mummification when the tomb was unsealed they were considered budda and put on display.

>few southern siberian tribes used to end ritual of communing with gods from upper world ("heavens") by sacrificing a horse for their favor. Horse was sacrificed by breaking his back with a log, and skinned carefully. meat and bones were removed. Meat, of course, was consumed (shaman who gained favor for tribe/family got best meat, men and women being next, following hierarchy) and bones were carefully secured. Skeleton was reconstructed, and put back into the skin, along with stuffing (most commonly straw, etc) to resemble the shape of a horse, then sewed back. The purpose was to "let the animal be reborn" (to keep the birth rate of horses steady and safe). Anthropologists who studied shamanism and siberian indigenous people sometimes stumbled upon this kind of "phantoms"

>some native southern american tribes (mapuche, for example) used red dye to adorn their bodies before venturing to the jungle, due to fear of demons that attacked or even killed in strange manner - by raping the victim anally

>ritual body mutilation in aboriginal australian culture, linked to several stages of maturity. Probably more popular one, wouldn't go in details (very long list, though almost surely could be found online)

>mammoths were considered creatures of the underground world, due to mammoth bodies being found in tundra, uncovered by water/wind. Since only dead specimens were found, mammoths were associated with "underground creatures"

The Mi'kmaq of eastern Canada had an extreme sense of hospitality: they even converted to Christianity because they didn't want to make their guests, the early settlers, uncomfortable.
Missionaries were frustrated to no end when they found out the Mi'kmaq always reverted back to "heathen paganism" the minute they were left alone.

Romans hadn't really seen forests until they came to Germany.
Forests absolutely terrified the shit out of them.
You can imagine what this did to Roman morale when their entire auxilia suddenly turned on them and the bushes suddenly belched forth thousands upon thousands of germans.