#TodayInHistory – September 21
3 min read
September 21 – Some important events on this day.
1192 👉🏼 English King Richard I the Lion hearted, captured by Leopold V, Duke of Austria
1217 👉🏼 The Estonian tribal leader Lembitu of Lehola was killed in a battle against Teutonic Knights
1348 👉🏼 Jews in Zurich, Switzerland, are accused of poisoning wells
1621 👉🏼 King James I of England gives Sir William Alexander a royal charter for colonisation of Nova Scotia
1792 👉🏼 French Revolution: The National Convention passes a proclamation announcing the formal abolition of the French monarchy
1885 👉🏼 Dutch demonstrate for general voting right
1898 👉🏼 Empress Dowager Cixi seizes power and ends the Hundred Days’ Reform in China, imprisoning the Guangxu Emperor
1915 👉🏼 Cecil Chubb buys English prehistoric monument Stonehenge for £6,600.
Perhaps the most famous prehistoric monument in the world, Stonehenge is also the most architecturally sophisticated, and served as an important ceremonial site and burial place from Neolithic times to the Bronze Age.
The earliest henge constructions date from 3000 BC. These took the form of circular ditches with timber structures.
From about 2500 BC the first stones were erected. Two types of stone were used, large saren stones and smaller bluestones, which were rearranged a number of times over 200-300 years and brought from considerable distance. The last major works which took place 1800-1500 BC were the digging of two rings of concentric pits.
Together with the nearby Avebury site it has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986.
1922 👉🏼 US President Warren G. Harding signs a joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine
1936 👉🏼 Spanish fascist junta names Francisco Franco to Generalissimo and Supreme Commander
1937 👉🏼 J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ is published by George Allen and Unwin in London
1949 👉🏼 Chinese Communist leaders proclaim the People’s Republic of China
1991 👉🏼 A new record time was set for shearing sheep and producing a wearable coat from the freshly shorn wool, all between sunrise and sunset on a single day.
The feat was first performed in June 1811 at Newbury, Berkshire. John Coxeter, a mill owner, was boasting that with his new mill machinery he could perform such a task. His boasting was overheard by Sir John Throckmorton, a baronet, who set a wager of 1,000 guineas that it could not be done.
2004 👉🏼 Green Day release their album “American Idiot” in the US
2016 👉🏼 Three genetic studies published in “Nature” conclude all non-Africans descended from one migration out of Africa 50-80,000 years ago
2016 👉🏼 Genomic study finding Australian Aboriginal oldest known civilisation on earth published in “Nature”
2017 👉🏼 Discovery of the first brainless animal that sleeps, the jellyfish Cassiopea, research published in “Current Biology” by Caltech scientists.
A group of students at the California Institute of Technology decided to find out one thing: if jellyfish sleep. This may seem innocuous, but jellyfish do not have brains, and scientists think sleep is rooted in a need to consolidate memory, among other things, in the brain.
So after months of late-night research, the students figured out that yes, the Cassiopea jellyfish exhibits sleep like behavior, suggesting that sleep is rooted more deeply in our biology than we realize. This makes the cassiopea the first known brainless animal to sleep – the jellyfish does not have a brain to speak of, just a diffuse set of nerve cells.
The study appears to show that sleep is a function developed very early on in the existence of life, and it has persisted, for reasons not clearly understood by scientists. Perhaps the brainless jellyfish is the answer…
