Original photo by Lovattpics/ iStock
Those who travel to Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, to see the final resting place of the world’s greatest playwright are greeted with an ominous warning befitting the legendary wordsmith: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.” Although historians aren’t exactly sure how Shakespeare died at the age of 52 in 1616 (fever is a leading theory), they do believe these words likely belong to the Bard himself. And in the 17th century, Shakespeare had cause to worry — grave-robbing was common at the time, and graves were often also moved to make room for more burials.
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It's a fibHousing the remains of such luminaries as Frédéric Chopin, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde (among many more), Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France, is the most-visited cemetery in the world, and sees roughly 3 million visitors annually.
However, Shakespeare’s curse appears to have done the trick, as the church kept his grave intact — at least, mostly. In 2016, a (noninvasive) radar scan of Shakespeare’s grave revealed, in an almost Shakespearean twist, that the playwright’s skull seemed to be missing. For evidence surrounding this missing head’s whereabouts, experts reexamined an 1879 article from The Argosy magazine that told a tale about a trophy-hunter taking Shakespeare’s skull. While the story was originally dismissed as fantasy, the details appear to closely line up with the results of the radar study. Although the story relates that the skull was deposited in another church some 15 miles away after the grave-robber panicked, an analysis of a skull at the church in question showed that it appeared to belong to a 70-year-old woman. We’ll likely never know for sure who stole Shakespeare’s skull — and whether the Bard’s curse delivered on its ominous promises.
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Some of the moons of the planet Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters.
The oldest known burial site was possibly not made by Homo sapiens.
Scientists know that Homo sapiens have been burying their dead for at least 78,000 years, but 2023 research argued that this funerary practice may not be unique to our species. Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, recently explored the Rising Star cave in South Africa. Although incredibly difficult to access, this cave is well known because it contains remains of Homo naledi, a hominin with brains around one-third the size of modern humans’ brains. In a non-peer reviewed study published in the journal eLife, Berger argued that this species practiced a kind of funerary rite — they “dug holes that disrupted the subsurface stratigraphy and interred the remains of H. naledi individuals.” However, other experts have found Berger’s work unconvincing, and doubt that such a primitive species would exhibit such a complex culture. If Berger is right, this would be the first piece of evidence that a species other than Homo sapiens buried their dead.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
