In February 1838, a young officer of the Bengal Engineers named T. S. Burt left his assigned route in central India because the men carrying his palanquin told him there was something worth seeing in the forest. What he found, and reported later that year to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, was a…

In October 2013 the British Museum opened Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, a survey of Japanese woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books produced roughly between 1600 and 1900. It ran until 5 January 2014 and was curated by Timothy Clark, head of the museum's Japanese section,…

Almost everyone recognizes the drawing: a man with four arms and four legs, stretched inside a circle and a square, staring out from posters, textbooks, and the Italian one-euro coin. Far fewer people know what Leonardo's Vitruvian Man was for — or what it was, and was not, claiming about the human…

In a limestone cave in the Swabian Jura of southern Germany, an archaeological team lifted six fragments of carved mammoth ivory out of the dirt in September 2008. Assembled, they formed a female figure roughly 6 cm (2.4 in) tall, headless, with a small carved ring where a head might have been — a…