You're looking at the world’s oldest woven linen garment called the Tarkhan Dress. At 5100 to 5500 years old, it dates to the dawn of the kingdom of Egypt. After it was found in the early 1900s, archeologists have concluded that it signals the complexity and wealth of the ancient society that produced it. The rips at the bottom of the garment also suggests that it probably fell past the knees originally.

A handful of garments of similar age have survived to the present day, but those were simply wrapped or draped around the body. The Tarkhan dress, on the other hand, is ancient haute couture. With its tailored sleeves, V-neck, and narrow pleats, it would look perfectly at home in a modern department store. ...

Even though being afraid of the dark sounds childish, our fear of the dark is an evolutionary trait that we picked up to survive real-life predators stalking the night. Researchers have hypothesised that this innate fear stems from a point of human history when we were nowhere near the top predators we are today. Humans only really became super predators with the advent of technology, which wasn’t that long ago.

Before technology, our ancestors were constantly on the look-out for predators that wanted nothing more than to chow down on human sandwiches. To make that even scarier, most of these predators hunted at night - a time of day when we are especially vulnerable to attack because of our relatively poor eyesight.  

This means that it was ...