Tarim mummies

The "Xiaohe Mummy", exhibited in Xinjiang Museum, is one of the oldest Tarim mummies, dating more than 3800 years ago. Another mummy from the same place is the " Princess of Xiaohe ".

A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery

A carpet beater

Xinjiang's Tarim Basin gave up Bronze Age mummies with red and blonde hair, plaid textiles, and features no one expected in 2nd-millennium-BCE China — their genetic origin is still genuinely contested.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'

Parmalat

Parmalat's CFO produced a Bank of America account statement confirming €4 billion — it was a photocopied forgery. The dairy company behind your supermarket milk had a $14 billion hole in its books. Europe's Enron, assembled with a scanner.

Sharpeville massacre

On March 21, 1960, South African police fired into a crowd of sixty-nine protesters in Sharpeville — most bullets entered their backs. The massacre lasted roughly forty seconds. It triggered South Africa's first international arms embargo.

Benedict Arnold

Benedict Arnold — wounded twice in American service, the hero of Saratoga — negotiated the surrender of West Point to the British for £20,000 and a military commission. His handler, Major John André, was caught with the plans in his boot.

Gas gangrene

Prisoners were tied to outdoor stakes, grenades were detonated beside them, and researchers measured gangrene spreading across the wounds — hourly, on a clipboard, in Manchurian winter air.

Carpet beater

Woven rattan, swung hard against hanging rugs in the yard every spring — the carpet beater was killed by one invention, the vacuum cleaner, within thirty years of its own peak production.

Dynamite

Alfred Nobel read his own obituary—'merchant of death'—while still alive, then spent his fortune engineering the Peace Prize to rewrite his legacy. The man who perfected mass killing also endowed its antidote.

Marcus Licinius Crassus

Rome's wealthiest man — worth roughly one-fifth of the entire Roman treasury — died at Carrhae in 53 BCE when Parthians poured molten gold down his throat, mocking his legendary greed.